Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end.

Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud.

And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards.

I’ll take a stab at the problem: an “actual professional” in this context is someone who makes their money by using the computer.

> What in the world is an actual professional?

Well, that is an easy question - actual professionals are people involved in making, marketing and distributing porno

That does include practically every white collar occupation at this point.

Pretty sure content creators are the core of the Pro series. It's not uncommon to have multiple design apps open at the same time, along with team apps, multiple browsers each running multiple apps, and multiple monitors.

And that's just web design.

Now open your eyes and look around your room. Everything you see was designed by someone, most likely on a Pro.

It's just a name, if you need long battery life, bigger screen, dedicated gpu, etc. then you choose appropriately. Who cares what the Pro means.

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

I think it’s because youtubers like linustech etc are the type of people who review these laptops, they live in their bubble that only “real” professionals are those who edit videos.

I’d extend it to mean someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient (for example, they are using dev tools or video editing as opposed to Excel, Word and email).

i spend 1/3 of my workday waiting for xcode to build

Of course there are specific niches, but it's pretty easy to answer in general: 'actual professionals' need some combination of two criteria - capacity and reliability/durability/usability. A device which can handle 'large' loads - be it CPU-bound, memory/storage-bound, or even screen size bound, and can be worked hard for 6-8-10-12 hours per day, 5-6-7 days per week without either the machine or the user breaking.

The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.

That would exclude many programming positions, though, since really the old Air is perfectly fine for most SWE positions. Not optimal, but you can run iterm2, you can run a web browser, and you can run vim.

It seems like a reasonable definition to me as long as it's clear that "the computer" means that specific computer.

e.g. In this definition, if you use a PC at your office and a laptop at home for non-work stuff, your work PC is being used by a "professional" and your home laptop isn't.

I’ve seen a screenshot of someone in consultancy roles, an obvious professional by dictionary definition, trash talking hard and mean on some software developers for demanding computers that can build software, that however has no tangible merit in their eyes, like PowerPoint or Excel performances. There might be something interesting in divisions across different types of “Pro”.

I don’t think it’s necessarily good that people say Word or Excel is non-Pro tasks fit for cheap and “lite” computers.

My friends brother runs a landscaping business, purely off his iphone. He asked me for advice on how to get his iphone onto a laptop, like with an emulator or something. This was about a year ago, so the ARM mac stuff was just rumors at that stage, and I mentioned that it wasnt possible.

Now, I can say hey if you get one of the new macbooks / mac minis, you can run your iphone apps natively. He probably will be one of their first customers.

I wouldnt be surprised if there was a huge 'professional' market that is untapped. not the traditional professional market but the ones which want something as simple & familiar as a iphone, on a desktop.

Here is my definition:

In this context, a professional is someone whose productivity is limited by the power of the computer. A developer compiling large code base on their computer. A person doing video editing. These are examples. And maybe “professional” is the wrong term, but I think that is what people are aiming for when they use that word in this context.

We say the 'pro' in MacBook Pro hasn't stood for professional grade equipment in at least a decade, but for equipment for someone who considers themself to be a professional.

People also regularly misplace their importance and prevalence in industry. For instance, you see more Linux than Mac in the big color and VFX houses.

It's important to trust and value your tools, which is how prosumers generally feel about their Macs, and they do make nice frontends for the computers that perform the actual work.

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

They get outsized influence because they're the ones that make the shiny youtube reviews (using their video editing skills).

"Pro" is really just a marketing misnomer for "premium".

In my experience in IT support there are very few people where this is actually the case.

For most people their ability to use the computer is the blocker. This also involves the ability yo make sane file format/compression decisions if they work with graphics or video.

Why bother with all that? Isn’t it easy enough to pair a keyboard and mouse to an iPad?

It’s a generalization, of course there are exceptions

YouTube has grown by triple digits. Those video “content creators”, from those just messing around to the professional film makers, are a huge opportunity for Apple to secure mind share in. Billions of views on YouTube. Billions of videos too.

I suspect the M1 powered Macs will be hugely successful and very useful for multiple types of users.

Only since the most recent version of iPad software, before that connecting a mouse was either impossible or through a hacky accessibility system.

I for example use the computer to develop ERP systems. I have always around 10 Docker containers running with different versions of the ERP's. I also need to run SQL server natively on my machine. Also need to run VScode, Chrome, have few Excel's open, use Teams all day long, open Visual Studio from time to time and work with it etc.

Interesting. Just out of curiosity, can you let us know which apps he uses? I am guessing a CRM id one of those

> someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient

Given how powered up the Air has become, this is a thin envelope.

> What in the world is an actual professional?

I would say that generally, a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity.

A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete.

In all these cases, it's the quality and innovation in the tool, that's holding these professionals back from being even better at their job than they already are.

Also, take special note of the case of the stenographer: professionals often require special professional variants of their tools, which trade off a longer learning curve for a higher productivity ceiling once learned. A stenographic keyboard takes years to learn, but all non-stenographic keyboards cap out at 150WPM, while stenographic keyboards allow those trained in their use to achieve 300+WPM.

And to make one more point: a professional car driver isn't a race-car driver. A professional car driver is a chauffeur. Rolls-Royce's cars aren't famous for how luxurious they are to drive; they're famous for having all the amenities needed by professional drivers — chauffeurs — to allow them to efficiently cater to their clients' needs. Limousines are the same kind of "professional tools" that stenographic keyboards are: they increase chauffeuring productivity.

> How did [video editing] become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

Because all tech vloggers and most tech pundits — the people who review tech — edit videos as part of their jobs, of course ;)

See, I think that is very far from the definition a lot of others have in mind. By your definition, probably 95% of professionals don't need any more power than a macbook air.

Gruber addresses this in his latest post [1]. Short answer: Pro usually means nicer, not necessarily for professionals only.

Think about it: the M1-based MacBook Air has better CPU and graphics performance than Intel-based laptops—including Apple’s—that are targeted at professionals.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_mac...

Unlikely. Most CAD users are on Windows.

I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.

You don't compile your code?

Obviously it depends greatly on what kind of software you are writing, but at all my dev jobs, I eventually end up waiting for some amount of time while the CPU heats the room up.

Notably, VIM is inevitably more gentle on my CPU than VSCode and similar.

I don't see these being very useful for video editing with RAM maxing out at 16gb. Maybe 1080p, but not 4k.

(And the small storage, but that can be remedied with a NAS or other external storage, and then fast local scratch space only needs to be big enough for a couple of projects at a time)

> What percent of the working population are video editors?

Most of the working population could get away with using basically any computer - if you're marketing a computer as 'Pro' you're talking to a specific subset of that. (Or you're just banking on it working as aspirational marketing and don't actually care about professionals)

What are those Rolls Royce features needed by chauffeurs?

It depends on the project. E.g. if you ever have to compile the linux kernel, or firefox you'll be wishing for a beefy cpu.

Regardless of the "Pro" meaning, my 2014 MBP is significantly faster than my top end 2018 Macbook Air. The MacBook Air was frustratingly slow. The most noticeable place was switching apps (like Cmd-Tab) and having it not keep up but there were plenty of other places.

Pro to me = Provides more power. That's it.

Looking forward to the next MBP

You could comfortable develop say a large e-commerce site on a 7 year old Macbook Pro, so I’d assume an M1 based Air would be equally fine.

Rolls Royce isn't a tool for the chauffeur, but it's a tool for the passenger. It's a tool for distributing the information that the passenger is wealthy enough to own it, and it enables more conversation options with certain NPCs ;p

I've been around software development for over 20 years.

Never met a single engineer who didn't want faster build/test cycles.

I envy writers in a sense. Their job doesn't require fast hardware so the computer is always waiting for them.

Programmers have to deal with compilation wait times, lack of RAM slowing down workflows, network latency, etc. We have to wait for the computer to do their job.

I await the day that I won't have to deal with this and computers would be as fast as our train of thought(human input latency nonwithstanding). But I won't hold my breath.

People are regularly doing 4K video editing on their iPhones and iPads.

In particular with Luma Fusion.

”Pro” doesn't implicitly mean ”Pro Video Editor”.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065664.)

They have shown impressive performance with 6k and 8k ProRes footage, even ipad pros and latest iphones are pretty incredible when it comes to editing 4K video and exporting it faster than latest macbooks. With Thunderbolt it's also pretty easy to extend high performance storage.

I wasn't specifically referring to video editors (although the comment I replied to was), just anyone that needs/benefits from more powerful hardware to do their job.

I was just calling out the idea that professionals being a small portion of literally everyone is a useful argument to make. How many markets aren't?

Except a lot of people work on remote servers. My work MBP is nice, but really it’s just a terminal to an 80vcpu server.

You just came here to say you use VIM.

I assume there's some clever caching from fast storage + prerendering lower res footage to scrub through?

I was going off normal recommendations for video editing on x86 desktops/laptops. But it makes sense they'd go the extra mile on the software end to make it work on phones.

I share an office with quite a few “professional users” I guess you’d call them. There are directors and 3D graphics people using mac pro towers and I’m sure they’d fit the definition, in that performance is a significant bottleneck for them and their output is tied to their hardware.

What if you wanted to drive a few more monitors for logging, monitoring and docs or have a local k3s cluster running for development or run some exploratory scripts on large data sets or build a large project from source? Professional programming is a vast and varied field.

You missed their point slightly. You wouldn’t be one of the users that is limited by the constraints of that tool.

If I’m a professional driver, but my passenger likes being discreet for example, then maybe I drive a Camry instead of a Rolls Royce. In your case, you probably don’t need a professional-grade laptop.

Me however, also a professional programmer, I run about 10 docker containers, a big ide, and lots of other hungry programs. I definitely am less limited when my computer is faster.

To be fair, it's pretty outdated terminology.

It comes from an era when computers were so genuinely slow that doing almost anything - even using page layout like Pagemaker, or setting up just a single track song in a DAW, had tons of render lag. Even spreadsheets would take significant amounts of crunch time to run their calcs, in the very early days. This meant that most work done on computers, with anything larger than a "toy/hello-world" dataset, was going to be painfully slow. That's why they called it "professional" - because you were actually using datasets large enough to burden the beast. Actually balancing a whole company's finances with a spreadsheet, rather than tallying up a little 10-item list.

I want to emphasize that "majoritarian" aspect of it - it wasn't just a few specific kinds, it was a majority of ALL kinds of work.

And that's changed.

We're now at a point where only a tiny minority of tasks done on computers actually have throughput limits based on the computer rather than the operator.

Esc key vs touch bar does not influence how you can use vim?

In my experience, every teacher I know for the last 6-8 months.

Absolutely incorrect. Watch e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBIkJSpqcFs

Rolls-Royce’s cars are designed for use as service cars, in corporate/government motor-pools. They’re essentially the ultimate Uber car. Rich individuals are actively discouraged[1] from buying them to drive themselves. (They’re actually kind of crap for driving yourself in!)

If a rich individual owns an RR model, it’s always because 1. they have retained the services of a professional chauffeur, and 2. the chauffeur has requisitioned one, to use to serve their client’s needs better.

Ask any ridesharing-service driver who worries about customer-experience — the ones that deck out the back with TVs and the like — what they wish they were driving.

A few example features these cars have:

• a silent and smooth ride allowing for meetings or teleconferences to occur in the back seat (this “feature” is actually achieved through many different implementation-level features; it’s not just the suspension. For example, they overbuy on engines — or rather, overbuild[2] — and then RPM-limit them, so that the engine never redlines, so that it’ll never make noise. They make the car heavy on purpose, so that the client won’t even feel speedbumps. Etc.)

• A set of automated rear seat controls... in the front. You know who’s coming, you set the car up the way they’re expecting, quickly and efficiently. This includes separate light and temperature “zones”, in case you have a pair of clients with mutually-exclusive needs. Yes, you can deploy a rear side window-shade from the driver’s seat (presumably in response to your client saying they have a migraine or a hangover.)

• An umbrella that deploys from the driver’s door. This is there for the chauffeur, so they can get out first, have an umbrella snap into their hand, and then use it to shield their client from the rain as they open the client’s door.

• A sliding+tinting sound-isolation window between the front and back, controlled by the client in the back; but then an intercom which the front can use to communicate to the back despite the isolation window — but only one-way (i.e. the front cannot hear the back through the intercom.) Clients can thus trust that their chauffeur is unable to listen into their private conversations if they have the isolation window up.

• A lot of field repair equipment in the boot. These cars even have a specific (pre-populated!) slot for spare sparkplugs; plus a full set of hand-tools required to get at the consumables under the hood. The chauffeur or their maintenance person is supposed to populate this stuff when it’s been used; such that the driver is never caught without this stuff in the field; such that—at least for most problems the car might encounter—the car will never be stalled on the side of the road for more than a few minutes.

Etc etc. These cars (from which most “limousines” are cargo-cutting the look, without copying the features) are built from the ground up to offer features for chauffeurs to use to serve client needs; rather than to offer features clients use to serve their own needs.

Which is why these cars are expensive. They’re really not luxury items (as can be seen by the fact that they retain most of their value in the secondary market), but rather:

1. it’s just expensive to build a car this way, because these use-cases, and the parts they require, are somewhat unique;

2. the people who buy these cars — who are by-and-large not individuals, but rather are businesses/governments with a motorpool component — are willing to pay more to get something that can be used at sustained load for decades with low downtime and high maintainability; to serve many different clients with varying needs, changing configuration quickly and efficiently; and to offer a smooth and reliable set of amenities to said clients. In other words, motorpools buy these Rolls-Royce limos instead of forcing regular sedans into that role, for the same reason IT departments buy servers instead of forcing regular PCs into that role.

—————

[1] RR did build their Wraith model so they could actually have something to offer these people who wanted a Rolls-Royce car to drive themselves. But it’s really kind of a silly “collector’s model” — most people in the market for a luxury coupe wouldn’t bother with it. It’s just a halo product for gearhead collectors with RR brand loyalty.

[2] Rolls-Royce Motors, the car maker, is actually owned by their engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce plc. RR plc exists to engineer and build engines and turbines for these sort of server-like high-reliability low-downtime SLAed use-cases, as in planes, rockets, power plants, etc. RR plc went into the car business for the same reason Tesla did: as a testbed and funding source for their powertrain technologies.

That's fair. I think a lot depends on your stack and the specific project. Right now I spend a good chunk of time waiting for builds (usually 10-20 seconds) and my previous job was worse. Prior to that, not so much.

A professional user of a given tool. It's a qualified phrase.

You can be a professional, without being a professional user of all your tools. In fact, for any such tool, there's probably only one or two professions that are professional users of that tool specifically (i.e. where that is the tool that constrains their productivity.)

Many professions aren't constrained by any tools, but rather are constrained by human thinking speed, or human mental capacity for conceptual complexity. These people aren't "professional users" of any tools. They're just regular users of those tools.

So, to sum up — when a tool is described as being "for professionals", what that means is that the tool serves the needs of people who are members of a profession whose productivity is constrained by the quality of that tool. It doesn't mean that it's for anyone who has a profession. Just people who have those professions. They know who they are. They're the people who were frustrated by the tool they have now, and for whom seeing the new tool elicits a joy of the release of that frustration. An "ah, finally, I can get on with my work without [tool] getting in my way so much."

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Programming is a profession that is most of the time constrained by thinking speed. (Although, some of the time, we're constrained by grokking speed, which is affected by the quality of the tools known as programming languages, and sometimes the tools known as IDE code-navigation.)

Very little time in a programmer's life is spent waiting for a build to happen, with literally no other productive tasks that they could be doing while they wait.

(Someone whose role comes down solely to QA testing, on the other hand, tends to be a professional user of CI build servers. Faster CI server? More productive QA.)

I admit that my experience with RR is the same as experience with deep space exploration (equals zero), so your comment was a quite entertaining read. Thanks ;)