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

The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes.

Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

Many apps optimized for the x64 platform won't run as well as the benchmarks.

You cant run bootcamp on these..

For me atm thats a dealbreaker.. but I still want one

I was going to add you cant do Android development on these, as you need Android Studio, but that seems to be on the way — Support for Apple Silicon is in progress

Far more pluralistic software environments would be a huge factor.

I assume they have the OpenJDK JVM ported at this point so all of JetBrains' products should be working or close to working.

I think this is an important one to keep in mind. I'm sure most native Mac apps will be compiled to ARM, but a lot of existing apps won't.

Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps.

I for one really wouldn't mind if Apple would build a native app to replace Electron apps, e.g. a chat app that works as a good client for (what I have open right now in Rambox) Discord, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and multiple Slack channels. Or their own Spotify client. Or a big update to XCode so it can use language servers for VS Code and it's viable to use for (what I do right now) Typescript, PHP and Go development.

They have more than enough money to invest in dozens of development teams or startups to push out new native apps.

One day I'll switch away from Chrome in favor of Safari as well. Maybe.

(I am taking recommendations for native alternatives to apps)

They did mention in a presentation some applications ran even quicker in Rosetta 2 than native. Though Wine isn't an emulator, I've seen the same in Wine numerous times. How many, which, etc, who knows? Interesting to figure out regardless.

Electron seems to have support in recent beta releases.

Even if you could, it wouldn't really help, as it would only be able to boot Windows for ARM, which has even less software support.

There's work being done getting Wine on ARM to emulate Windows/x86-64.

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

as a power user I will not be touching anything apple ARM until all my hundreds of software apps are certified to work exactly the same as on x86_64. i will not rely on rosetta to take care of this. i need actual testing.

besides this, 8GB of RAM is how much a single instance of chrome uses. i run 3 chrome instances, 2 firefox and 2 safari. and this is just for web.

this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

as such i was looking into a lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

There are enough people who do not want to deal with MacOS and Darwin regardless the hardware specs.

Also the way of least friction is usually to use whatever the rest of your team uses. There are even relevant differences in Docker for MacOS vs Docker for Linux that make cross platform difficult (in particular thinking about host.docker.internal, but there are certainly more). Working with C/C++ is another pain point for cross platform, which already starts with Apples own Clang and different lib naming conventions.

Going away from x86 makes this situation certainly not better.

As expected, the Apple M1 is a little faster than Inter Tiger Lake in single-thread applications, but it is a little slower than AMD Renoir in multi-threaded applications.

So for things like software development where you compile frequently your projects, the new Apple computers are a little slower than similar computers with AMD CPUs.

So even when taking only CPU performance into consideration, there are reasons to choose other computers than those with Apple Silicon, depending on what you want to do.

Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance.

Those who want to use Apple software will buy Apple products, those who do not want to use Apple software will not buy Apple products, like until now, regardless which have better performance.

They have to make the claim ‘millions of devices run Java true’. But anyway. A lot of programming languages are going to have to support Arm now. Interpreters for like php and js must be cross-compiled and then most things can work. Like Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level, see https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2959

The Macbook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB isn't really priced competitively here in Germany. It's almost 1600€.

> Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance.

That's exactly the reason why you would chose Apple Silicon right now where you can choose between Intel and Apple SoC. There are of course other reasons such as battery life and price.

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Apple is at day 1 of their two year migration to Apple Silicon. Your judgement seems not just a little premature.

They are not priced competitive. Cheapest macbook air starts from $999. Cheapest Dell Inspiron starts from $319.

Answer straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAo8gnUCWzE

The cheapest Dell Inspiron doesn't even hold a candle to the MacBook Air. They're not competing in the same class...

Asking myself that very same question. I've been booting linux, quite happily I might add, off mid/high-end Dells and HPs for a while. The last time I looked Airs were still dual-core, and much more expensive for 16 GB.

I'm not an Apple fan, but the change in value is stunning. I don't need a new laptop currently...

Basically anyone not lucky to live in countries with comparable economy to US, aka 80% of world IT.

It certainly does when the best one can hope to bring home as software engineer is around 1000 euros after taxes.

You're free to buy the 50% plastic Dell Inspiron which comes with is probably underpowered for Windows 10 and comes with several free nagwares

You might be better served by wiping it and installing Linux though

it depends how you consider it.

“two year migration” sounds just about right for a transition to something non apple.

we can then re-visit apple in 3 years time.

I fully get that the cheapest option might fit your budget and the MBA doesn't. And that's absolutely fine. Been there, done that. Heck, I wish my 1st laptop had cost $300 but in the end it was more around what the MBA cost today.

But it's not really an Apples to Apples comparison.

Azul and Microsoft are doing the port.

€1665 in Czechia, and we have much lower purchasing power.

They also doubled (!!!) the SSD speeds, at least according to their slides. Presumably swapping will be much more seamless, so I'm not sure low RAM would be a huge issue for most day to day tasks.

> Working with C/C++ is another pain point for cross platform, which already starts with Apples own Clang and different lib naming conventions.

A walk in the part to anyone that had to deal with coding with C or C++ across UNIX flavours.

Most popular languages have supported Arm for many years already, on Linux (and more recently, some of them on Android and iOS).

> Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level

(for Linux)

I am lucky for having gotten the opportunity to live and work in a country where buying an Apple device is not an issue, and there are plenty of them around the office, but I don't forget my roots nor the monetary possibilities of similar countries that I had the fortune to visit.

It will still be a problem. The difference in access time between RAM and SSDs is still order of magnitude faster for RAM (10s of micro-seconds vs 10s of nano-seconds). So even if they doubles speeds random access of small data chunks will still choke your performance.

To be honest, you'd expect widely traded good to trade at the same prices, regardless of local purchasing power.

That happened regularly in the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC.

I can't understand why you think Apple should be building apps for their competitors. It's very strange.

Use Apple Music, Messages, Safari, Swift if you want first-class support.

Or one of the better options now might be to use the iOS apps for Slack, Spotify etc.

You also have GraalVM (Oracle), OpenJ9 (IBM) and Corretto (Amazon).

So plenty of enterprise-class JVMs available.

That's true, for sure. But I was answering to "Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?". The answer is simple, everyone, who does not want to spend $999 will buy an Intel/AMD laptop. And $999 is quite a lot for someone who does not need a powerful workhorse. That Insiron is extremely underpowered, yet it'll launch web browser and office apps with some swapping here and there. Apple is not going to kill x86 laptop market with it, just like it won't kill smartphone market with their $400 SE phone when you can buy $100 android phone.

Another thing is that you can buy "gaming" laptop for $999. Something like i7-10750H with GTX 1650. And it's powerful enough to run almost any game on high to medium setting. Apple GPU is awesome compared to Intel GPU, but compared to dedicated Nvidia GPU - not so much. So if you need GPU for gaming, that's another area where Apple does not compete with their new laptops. At least for now.

Ultrabook with focus on portability and long battery life - Apple is awesome here.

That's for each buyer to consider, based on their budget and prospects.

Well, buying an Apple laptop is not a necessity or some fundamental human right. It's a nicety for those who can afford it and appreciate the differences (and understand the tradeoffs).

In raw performance per buck you could always get a customer PC setup for cheaper, especially in desktop form.

In some countries, even a $300 laptop comes down to half a year's salaries...

IIRC, Azul is a hardware vendor for the JVM ... can you please share a public source on this collaboration between Azul & Microsoft?

I jumped ship back to Linux (still sucks). This is the first new computer I’ve bought in almost a decade.

I think many professionals who need new hardware will use this as the catalyst to make them move back to PC hardware. The M1 looks amazing, but I need more than just Apple software to do my work. It’ll be a while before all the things I use get migrated.

Yep, most things were ported in the first wave of linux arm enthusiasm around the netwinder/ipaq craze 20 years ago.

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows

- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines

- only 2 thunderbolt ports

- limited to 16GB RAM

- no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards

- no AAA gaming

- can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.

The price seems to be the same except for tax. Germany has a 16% rate (July-Dec 2020) and Czechia 21% for sales tax/VAT.

No Linux support is a deal breaker. (current versions with Intel included)

But these “features” are not highlighted on the product page. (Aside from memory) The core count and battery performance are listed. I think many people will buy these. And arm64 containers will come in time with adoption.

I don’t think Azul have sold hardware in a few years. Their current offerings, Zing and Zulu, are cross platform JVMs and don’t appear to be sold with any hardware.

Until all software is ported to ARM, it will run in emulation, which is going to be slower in most cases. People invested in plug-in ecosystems, like DAWs or video editing, will likely have an endless long tail of plug-ins that aren't getting ported, or that require a re-purchase to get an ARM version. And due to Rosetta's architecture, you can't mix ARM and x86 plug-ins (in-process, like VSTs - Apple wants you to use AUv3 which is out of process but nobody does that), so you will be running your entire workflow under emulation until you can make the switch hard and all at once. And some of your software will never make it.

Mark my words, this is going to be a massive shit show for people using those ecosystems, for 5 years if not 10. It already happened with the PPC transition.

Before Brexit sometimes the you could buy apple stuff for less on amazon.co.uk than in the rest of Europe because the price was fixed in GBP.

You lost me at "good Windows laptops".

macOS has plenty of warts, but my experience with high quality equipment (Thinkpad, XPS, Alienware) has left me ultimately disappointed with Windows in many day to day situations compared to Mac.

Windows is still clunky, despite many improvements. And aside from a Thinkpad Carbon X1, I haven't used any laptop with the performance and build quality (for the size/money) as a Macbook Air.

It's not trying to compete with German PCs (which have some nice options, but yet are Windows PCs, not Macs).

I'm not an Apple fanboy, and I'm still very displeased with many of their decisions (touchbar being #1 on MBPs). But if you consider the packaging (small, light, sturdy, now-decent keyboard), and consider their performance, and then consider macOS, I think they are more than competitive.

Even if you match every spec, including size/weight and durability, it comes down to Windows vs macOS. Ironically, macOS is free while Windows is not, but macOS is worth more (to me and many others).

> "no AAA gaming"

This is, arguably, a disadvantage of any Mac.

But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

I think it often depends on big resellers (like Best Buy, for example). They can provide discounts which Apple will not do directly to the customer, and which other resellers can't do because they don't turn enough units.

That's true of many other common goods worldwide. Unless you can buy a locally made item in a lower purchasing power country, you will usually pay a currency exchange equivalent price for the item. Actually you often pay more because the local shop selling the product cannot get bulk pricing and pass along the discount to you.

Finally, when you add the local taxes - 23% in Portugal, for example - the price can be much higher compared to Alaska, US (< 2%). That last bit is really not Apple's fault.

It's more about losing the ability to boot into windows to game there, as well as losing egpu support.

Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

Maybe the gaming part.

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Their focus is not on power users ? They just completed the first, small, step of the migration to ARM. They only updated the very low-end models, those who were never targeted at power users anyway, and we're seeing that their cheapest, lowest-end models are whooping the i9 MBPro's ass.

Sure, the features and RAM may not be there yet, but again, these are the low-end models. If we're seeing this level of performance out of an MBAir or Mini. I can't wait to see what the Mac Pro is going to be capable of.

> it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus

Depends on the definition of "power user". Music producers, video editors, and iOS developers will be served quite well.

> lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

When making that calculation, one should also take power consumption into account. $ per cycle is very low now with the new CPU.

Why would anyone who is not forced to buy a Mac get one of these?

You still have to rebuild your software and explicitly support a bunch of different architectures.

If porting IOS games is easy then gaming for most people shouldn't be an issue.

Sure, here sparing you the effort to learn how to use Google or whatever search engine you like using.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/09/microsoft-windows-mac-arm...

Indeed, which gets back to the original OP point not standing.

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

Apple devices are definitely not priced competitive outside first world countries.

They also updated the MacBook Pro so that is exactly the performance you are going to get for this generation.

The big screen model might give you more cores and RAM but IPC is going to be exactly the same.

I'm primarily a Mac user but laptops are cheap. If I were working on a team doing Linux development for x86 I'd certainly have a Linux laptop for that even if I preferred a MacBook for other purposes.

whatsapp support in native apps is not something that isnt happening because there is no will in teams or companies to do that. its just not possible, there are no APIs. everything you see is a workaround or mashup of the whatsapp web feature

Azul was originally a hardware vendor with Java-optimized silicon. They haven't sold hardware AFAIK for probably over a decade.

And I’ve been getting Rust to work on Apple Silicon. It’s only tier 2 for now, but that’s mostly because there are no CI providers so we can’t automatically run tests for it. I’ve been running them by hand.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/73908

I feel like the demand for desktop versions of simple phone games is pretty low.

Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.

To the extent that games are made available for MacOS/ARM in the first place (admittedly a sticking point), it looks like these machines will be able to play most of them reasonably well. Certainly much better than most of Apples previous machines with integrated graphics or low end discrete GPUs.

won't emulation catch up in those timeframes ? still, 3+ yrs which is a long time...

Taking power consumption into account makes sense when the machine is running on battery power, but all modern processors are power efficient enough for the cost of electricity to be negligible for a tiny desktop computer.

I have a MacBook Air 2012, and have been waiting to upgrade for... 2 years already. The laptop will probably end up being 10 years old by the time I upgrade...

- crappy webcam,

- no built-in SD card reader (a 1TB SD card is ~200$, and my music does not need to be stored on an expensive SSD)

- magsafe.. if this was the only downgrade, I'd upgrade, but TBH I love magsafe on my mac and I would miss it if I upgrade.

Wouldn't the x86 version run under emulation?

"uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down"

Citation Needed.

Apple detractors LOVE to bring this idea up, but there's nothing to it in any real sense. Do Macs ship with a checkbox filled in that limits software vendors? Yes. This is a good thing. Is it trivial to change this setting? Also yes.

Anyone who buys a Mac can run any software on it they like. There is no lockdown.

I work on multiple OSX machines, servers run linux, and i have a single windows machine just got the few games that can't be run elsewhere.

The "netwinder/ipaq craze 20 years ago" would be 32-bit ARM (AArch32), while AFAIK this new chip is 64-bit ARM (AArch64); everything has to be ported again to this new ISA (though yeah, most things were already ported for Linux on AArch64).

Or anyone who had to deal with Microsoft's on version of everything.

Seems to be priced pretty competitively?

That and streaming direct to the browser

Point one C or C++ compiler vendor that has a pure ISO compiler with zero extensions.

Toy projects don't count.

As a related benefit to a non Mac user - ARM64 support for packages at build time is going to greatly improve over the next few years!

Hmm. I might buy one anyway and use a remote docker host for x86...

>macOS is free

Oh wow, that's cool, I didn't know that. Do you have a link to where I can download the free edition of macOS? Google doesn't seem to be helping me.

I agree. It is not without danger, the same as with Apps actually, that developers target only the iPad (touch interface) and don't care about optimizing for the Mac experience.

But on the whole I am optimistic.

> macOS is free while Windows is not

what laptop are you buying where you need to purchase a Windows license?

Eliminating MagSafe for power ports was one of the Apple choices I hated. So many times something has happened and ripped my power cable off my 2014 MBP, and MagSafe saved the laptop from damage or a fall. And worse, Apple has now applied new and different meaning to the same name :(.

I bought a thinkpad hoping to avoid quality issues that I’ve experienced with other machines. The hardware is great (except for the wimpy cooling), but I have had various annoying issues with drivers, bios updates, and the behavior of their system update tool.

Depends on your country, but here's a US example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macos-catalina/id1466841314?ls...

I got a new computer from work last year. I spent quite a while carefully studying my options, and what I saw came down to this:

If you're only looking for computers that are comparable according to the usual hardware specs (cpu, ram, etc.), a Mac costs 25-50% more than the cheapest comparable PC.

If you also throw ergonomic factors like weight and battery life into the comparison, there's no price difference.

(This was USA prices.)

IIRC, binaries on arm on osx have to be signed.

I.e. "We raised the walls on our garden further"

Balls to that, if I buy hardware I want to be able to run what I want on it or it's not a general purpose computer, it's something else.

The manufacturer of your laptop has paid Microsoft for the OS and is passing that cost on to you in the total price (excluding MS hardware such as the Surface).

Or if you buy a bare system or build your own, you need to buy Windows yourself.

Apple gives their OS away, but in theory you can only run it on their hardware.

The 13" MBP was never a pro "pro" model. I bet the big screen models next year will have more RAM and maybe an M2 chip.

> but IPC is going to be exactly the same.

I am not sure what you mean with this?

It's been a couple of generations since I used the Thinkpad, but wiping and carefully reinstalling only the useful drivers/apps was how to did it. Perhaps it's locked down now such that you can't do that (and if so, I wouldn't buy it!)

>Apple gives their OS away, but in theory you can only run it on their hardware.

If you don't understand why this isn't free then I have a bridge to sell you.

In my experience, Microsoft and PC laptop manufacturers still haven't figured out how to make a trackpad that works as well as a 2008 era Macbook.

Most games played by most players are on iOS & iPadOS, and macOS Big Sur will run them on your MacBook.

> - no AAA gaming

I thought Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc. were all pushing streaming gaming services that will run on any hardware with a decent internet connection. I would imagine the hardware video decoder in the M1 chip would allow 4K streaming video pretty well.

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Let's back up a second: Tim Cook said this transition would take place over two years. This is just the first batch of computers running Apple Silicon.

I certainly hope and think that Apple can come out with a beefy 16 inch MacBook Pro with 32 gigs of ram within the next two years. Also, in that time I imagine everything in Homebrew would be ported over natively.

They updated the lesser 13" Pro, but not the high-end 13" Pro (since 2016, it's been separated into two lines, with the high end one distinguished by higher TDP, four thunderbolt ports, and more fans) or the 16". IPC will be the same, sure, but I'd expect the higher end 13" and the 16" will have more cores or higher clock speed or both, to soak up the extra TDP headroom.

Three years isn't that long for CPU performance gains anymore, but even if it was, it isn't the emulation that gets faster, it's the hardware. Contemporary ARM machines emulating x64 would still be slower than contemporary x64 machines natively executing x64.

You're also going to be in a bind if Apple decides they don't care about the long tail and stops supporting emulation before all of your plugins have been converted (if they ever are).

It is an Apples to Dells comparison :)

In my experience, the Thinkpads are indeed the only real competition, hardware-wise.

When my current Mac dies, that's where I'm headed, but running Linux; Microsoft is less of a danger, so I don't outright boycott anymore, but I still find Windows super annoying to use.

Not really. Right now Apple Silicon would be translating most code and therefore be slower and possibly have worse battery life. By the time that isn't true anymore, the option of buying Intel from Apple will be gone and your choices will be ARM from Apple or a PC with Intel/AMD.

The x64 options from Apple are also uncompetitive with existing PCs already because they're using Intel processors when AMD's are faster.

This is often because it's translating syscalls rather than emulating them, so for applications that are only asking the OS to do the real work, in those cases it's running native code. And then it's running it on a current day CPU instead of one from two years ago.

Unfortunately, although applications like that exist, they're not the common case.

Most of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron).

I guess there will still be issues for people who need to run VMs or media apps like Adobe CC etc, and also it will take a while for some dev environments to be fully supported (https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 for example shows it will take some time to get to feature parity).

Overall though a lot of the hard work has already been done, and I'm sure in 2 years time or whenever the transition is 'complete', mac owners will be getting much more value for money with few drawbacks (the main one being higher walls around the garden)

Yes, they used to have hardware with a ton of cores/cpu's and large amounts of RAM if I remember correctly.

There is no emulation per se, there is a one time AOT translation of Intel to Arm. Then that native code just runs. So no emulator is running on the cpu while the app is.

There is an exception for apps with JIT and those will perform poorly (think Chrome and every Electron app).

Just buy a USB magsafe type cable for $20 and be done with it.

> So no emulator is running on the cpu while the app is.

Nonetheless, the translated code is going to be slower than ordinary native code because a lot of the information compilers use for optimization isn't available in the resulting binary, so the translator has to be extremely conservative in its assumptions.

Its the same chip so single core performance is going to be the same, unless they raise the clock.

I don't replace laptops that frequently, currently.

Yeah, it was around the time that thread-level parallelism was getting a lot of love. As I recall, they had some massive number of cores directly connected to each other and garbage collection at least partly in hardware. They got burned for pretty much the same reason a lot of the other custom CPU hardware of the time got burned; if you could just wait for Intel to double performance in a couple years it wasn't really worth going with some one-off design for a temporary advantage.

Apple is a lot bigger market now than PPC transition though

> Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

Buyers don't especially care about performance either to be honest, unless they care about one of those factors in order to need it.

> But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

Not really. The business models for desktop gaming are completely different to mobile devices, and there is no meaningful common market.

I think people will actually be surprised at how few games from iOS will even run on an ARM Mac because developers will block them.

It used to be possible to do some gaming on a Mac - the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac, especially with an eGPU. The end of x86 is the end of that market, forever.

> Most of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron).

They don't have desktop UIs, and will be a big step down for most users. You can't seriously argue the UI doesn't matter on a Mac.

Yep, though sadly, in my view, the current line up of Macbooks trackpads aren't as good as the 2008 era Macbooks either....

I disagree, my razer blade 15 has been amazing.

I agree for the most part; the exception would be if I were running the small machine as a server. I know this is outside of most use cases, but if I were buying a machine to have on all the time (Plex, email, whatever), I'd want to at least feel like it's not driving up my electric bill.

iOS games/apps run on Apple Silicon Mac, so that by itself opens up a huge gaming market.

Yep, in the intervening time ARM on Linux became popular enough that doing the required compiler backend work for 64-bit ARM in GCC, LLVM etc by commercial interests was a given, there was eg a big push for ARM on servers from various vendors. MS even ported Windows Server. Eg Hotspot/OpenJDK was ported in 2015.

There is a lockdown as you cannot even boot linux anymore...

Why would developers "block" their iOS games from running on ARM Macs?

If you need a computer for serious (long hours) use, I would always go for desktop, as you can get a vastly superior machine to any laptop, with massive amounts of disk space, memory, tons of cores, screens, etc. If you want a Mac, I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do.

For travelling, I don't think anything beats a Macbook due to how light, thin, and resilient they are. But my 2016 MBP is a pretty shit machine for its price. It's also loud (like every other laptop I've had). I avoid using it. Sure, if you take size/design/mechanical quality into account, it is probably unmatched. But for 95% of my computer usage, those are irrelevant, as I just sit at my desk. I had a company provided HP laptop (not sure if stock or upgraded by our IT staff) at my previous job which was far more performant than my Macbook, so I don't really agree that Windows laptops are necessarily bad, but it was even louder than the Macbook, and of course clunky and ugly.

For me personally, the new Macbooks are disqualified as viable work machines if it's really true that you can't use more than 1 external screen. That's just not a viable computer for me (for work). I will always have a Macbook though just because of how much I love them for travel. But a Macbook is more of a toy than a serious computer, especially if the 1 screen limit is true.

I have both platforms at the office for years, still haven't discovered what is so magic about the trackpad.

This is where idle power matters. I recently replaced a pretty low power atom in my nas with a i3-9100F. The peak power usage is probably a good 2x higher, but the idle power is just a couple watts, so I expect my average power draw to be much less since the power draw under plex/etc is about the same and the machine sits idle most of the time.

Maybe that's Windows or Windows pre installed bloatware specific ? The high end thinkpads (t/x/p/w/carbon) are generally well supported by Linux distros, partially thanks to many kernel and distro developers using them.

As for bios (well EFI these days) that should be handled very seamlessly via fwupd on all major Linux distros: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/

(Frankly seems much more robust to how it is handled on Windows - not at oll or via half broken OEM bloatware.)

" I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do."

Unfortunately they will also blow your wallet.

Not just the lack of will - hostile action and threats from whatsapp against even just community projects trying to build a client for a platform not supported by the official ones. This might no longer be the case but a couple years ago they still used to do that, so no wonder so little native clients exist.

The recent keyboard fiasco would say otherwise.

> "the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac"

Exactly. So it was never really the hardware that held back gaming on Mac, but the fact that from a game-development perspective it's an esoteric platform that has limited or no support for the main industry standard APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, etc).

It was never worth the effort for most game developers to bother porting games to the Mac because writing a custom port for Metal was way too expensive to justify for such a niche market.

But now with Apple Silicon, that all changes. If you're going to port your game to iOS (and that's surely tempting - it's a huge platform/market with powerful GPUs and a "spendy" customer base) then you basically get Mac for free with close to zero additional effort.

Wow, I just checked and yeah those prices are pretty insane, especially if you want a better-than-base model. I guess then in the desktop arena, Macs are at a disadvantage, because you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount.

1) Macs are harder to consider secure, they're effectively all jailbroken. Cheating/bypassing in app purchases will be rampant, reducing the opportunity for cross play, and the Mac market isn't big enough itself. These aren't insurmountable issues, but they require investment, and the additional Mac market probably isn't worth the outlay and risk.

2) You have to rebuild the UI, which costs money which the Mac version may well not recoup.

3) You have a different version for desktops that costs more upfront with less reliance on in-app mechanics that you don't want to undermine.

Professional use in creative industry - film, TV, videography, audio production, and a million other things. 16GB ram and a souped up integrated GPU won't cut it for many 'Pro' applications Mac has traditionally excelled at.

> "Macs are harder to consider secure, they're effectively all jailbroken."

OK, but that's no different to Windows and Android.

> "You have to rebuild the UI"

No. Even with apps this is no longer the case (see: "Mac Catalyst"), but it's certainly not true for games. Maybe you'd need to add some keyboard/mouse bindings, but that's about it. Even iPads support keyboards and mice now days!

Casual gaming market.

I do web development and I'm not sure how my locally compiled libs will behave on x86 based servers. We often upload our local build artifacts to the DEV envs... I'm not sure this will work on a different arc.

That said, my wife returned the macbook air she bought 3 weeks ago in favor of this new one, so I'll be able to test on that machine before I dive in.

I'm in the market for a new work machine myself, and have been eying a final-generation loaded Intel MBP16. I'm sure the AS models will catch up on graphics capability by the end of their transition time, though I'm certainly wondering what the first AS MBP16 will do for graphics. I certainly wouldn't buy less capability than the 5600M myself.

ARM Macs can't run unsigned software.

Macs are significantly cheaper in the US than in Europe.

Thanks for the link but there was no need for you to be patronizing about it.

FWIW, I originally thought your mention of Azul was a typo, so I parsed your comment as "Azure and Microsoft" before I realized the tautology, which was why I posted the question. I didn't realize that Azul had pivoted to be a software-based vendor of the JVM.

And don’t forget that all of the iPad/iPhone games will work on these laptops. That’s not quite the same thing as having major PC titles, but it’s not nothing either.

Yes, but code signing can be ad-hoc, can be done automatically at build time, and doesn't require notarization. So it's basically just a way to ensure the binary has not been tampered with. I don't really see the problem here, as the code signing itself does not prevent any kind of code from running on macOS Big Sur.

Catalina already broke a TON of legacy software and you cannot downgrade newer Macs to Mojave (at least not without some serious hacking efforts, and I know at least one person who tried and failed).

> Ultrabook with focus on portability and long battery life - Apple is awesome here.

Exactly that, I think that's the ultimate reason to have a laptop and if not, it might make sense to re-think the setup. Why should I buy a 1500$ Intel/AMD mobile workhorse when the battery is empty after 2 hours? It usually makes more sense to have a server at home or VPS for that. Also a lot of native Apps like Steam have first-class support for that nowadays. For the rest Parsec might work.

Edge to edge uniformity, physical feel, virtual feel of the scroll and motion, gestures. Other than that, sure, same.

If the bridge auto-upgrades itself for free for the next 8 years after the initial capital expenditures, I'm sure you'll easily find buyers.

Rosetta2 is mind blowing.

“ fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1”

https://mobile.twitter.com/hhariri/status/132678854650246349...

“…and ~14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating an Intel”

Yet the translated code will still run faster on the M1 than the original code runs on x86.

Why don’t you think the M2 will increase clock speed?

And the problem with the M1 isn’t performance, single core is already off the charts. The M2 is going to provide 32Gb and 64Gb systems with up to four thunderbolt/USB4 ports and support for dual 6K monitors.

You can get a fanless PC with a 1,700 single core GeekBench score for less than $1,600 euros in Europe?

You can change that on T2-based Intel Macs, at least, just like on Windows: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330

Of course, Apple as an OEM does not support running non-Mac OSes, so virtualization should still be preferred for most use cases.

Apple Silicon has integrated floating point hardware specifically designed to run JavaScript super fast, so Electron will be fine.

That's why I'm saying anymore. It was the case but it is no more possible with the new Apple Silicone laptop.

Consumers absolutely care that their Apple MacBook Pro has 20 hours of battery life, when the comparable XPS has only 10 hours or whatever.

The M1 running native code can retain/release objects five times faster than x86 processors running native code.

X86 code translated by Rosetta2 on the M1 retains/releases objects TWICE as fast as native x86 processors.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262387851813...

One of the most common operations done in MacOS is retain/release of objects. Rosetta2 translated code is TWICE as fast on the M1 as the original code on x86.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262387851813...

umm there are more ports than you think.

If Lenovo could for once figure out why the speakers on these Thinkpads are SO BAD, I wouldn't be reading this thread because I wouldn't care about Macs. I know there are headphones, but many times when I'm alone, I just want to watch a video and actually hear the people talk, can't do with the Thinkpad.

In other words, the biggest gaming market.

The biggest difference between Macbook trackpads vs the best for Windows is the super low hysteresis of pointer motion vs finger motion. I recently bought and returned a Microsoft Surface Book with "precision touchpad". The main reason for returing it was that pointer control feels sluggish compared to the Macbook and its pointer speed was too slow even at its fastest. The best Dell touchpads are no better and Lenovo trackpads are even worse.

I understand that this may be because PC touchpad hardware reports jitter, sometimes higher than it really is, and this causes the Precision Touchpad software to increase the hysteresis. Macbook touchpads have low jitter and the driver is tuned to benefit from it.

If anyone Microsoft with input into the Precision Touchpad reads this, why don't you fix it or work with your licensees to fix it?

So if an ios title uses a multi touch gesture how do you replicate that on MacOS?

My tiny desktop is on all the time (but idle most of the time) and that was the frame in which I wrote my comment.

I guess Microsoft will have to hurry up and build an ARM version of Windows so they can keep the rounding error number of BootCamp users satisfied.

The Macintosh, by design, was never a general purpose computer. It was a computer that Steve Jobs allowed you to use. The Apple II was the general purpose computer that Woz championed.

Oh dear lawd, Electron apps can get slower?

You can do those multitouch gestures on TouchBar /s

Certainly the Pro Desktops must be intended for Pro people that can quantify the number of billable hours they will save in Final Cut or Logic and come up with a "return of investment" figure.

The iMacs are a mistery to me, but guess I'm not the target market anyway. (I have a 2018 MBP)

I think price comparisons depend on what you're looking for. You cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$. That's pretty steep, especially considering other laptops will let you upgrade the RAM yourself. And along with that you get the touch bar and the garbage keyboard. I'm just one person, but that's why I would never buy one of these.

Every MacBook has a multitouch trackpad. It's rare that I ever use a mouse.

How does it handle DSP inner loops? SIMD? x87 code? Floating point corner cases like denormals? What about the inevitable cases where impedance mismatch between the architectures causes severe performance loss? Is Rosetta2 binary translated code guaranteed to be realtime-safe if the original code was? What about the JIT? There's no way that is realtime-safe. What happens if some realtime code triggers the JIT?

We still can't emulate some 20-year-old machines at full speed on modern hardware due to platform impedance mismatches. Rosetta2 may be good, but until someone runs a DAW on there with a pile of plug-ins and shows a significant performance gain over contemporary Intels (and zero unexpected dropouts), I'm not buying the story of Rosetta2 amazingness.

Hypothetical scenario: You save 50W (maybe too high, maybe not), use the machine for 10h every day, and a kWh costs you €0.40 (eg in Germany). You save €0.20 per day, €73 per year, and €365 in 5 years. Definitely a factor in areas with high electricity prices.

If you can sign ad-hoc then there's no point, right? Just modify and re-sign.

We still can't emulate some 20+ year old machines at native speed on modern hardware under certain conditions. Emulation always has corner cases where some awkward impedance mismatch between both architectures causes severe performance loss.

"Emulation" is a catch-all term that includes binary translation, static and dynamic, which every modern emulator uses (Apple just doesn't want you to use that name because people think emulation is slow). Rosetta2 is not a pure static translator, because such a thing can't exist (see: self-modifying code).

Just because binary translation is used doesn't mean it's magically as fast as native code. Converting code that runs on architecture A to run on architecture B always has corner cases where things end up a lot slower by necessity.

Citation needed. Not a microbenchmark, or a single example of some software. Actual sustained mixed workload usage of real life applications. Especially realtime-sensitive stuff like DAWs (where you have the added risk that calling into the JIT in the middle of a realtime thread can completely screw you over; keeping realtime-safe code realtime-safe under dynamic or even static binary translation is a whole extra can of worms).

There is an ARM version of Windows 10 that runs on the Surface Pro X [1].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/

> cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$

$1200 for the Macbook Air with 16GB RAM in USA. No touchbar, no garbage keyboard.

> you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount

It's not even a contest or similarly powerful, spend $3000 on an AMD + Nvidia PC and its significantly more powerful than the $5000 Mac Pro in both CPU and GPU compute.

When you buy a Mac you are subsidizing the development of that free OS. The the price of the OS is baked into the MSRP in both cases. Comparing the prices is apples-to-apples. Also, Microsoft has made it clear that Windows 10 will be around for a long time, so OS upgrades don't work the same way Windows once did.

There’s no indication from Apple that they are intentionally not supporting this feature - just that it doesn’t exist right now. That said in practice I never use BootCamp because the driver support is always sub-par. It’s a much nicer experience to virtualize, especially now that most virtualization platforms offer native support for Apple’s virtualization libraries, such that installing third party kernel extensions are less necessary now than ever before. (I think the only ones I tend to install now are Tuxera NTFS support which tends to be really high quality. Apple should just buy Tuxera and ship them natively.)

Sustained benchmarks await production hardware. But it will be surprising if Rosetta2 translated apps run slower. Not only will system calls be native, but common operations like retain/release are 2x faster under Rosetta3.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hhariri/status/132678854650246349...

Rosetta2 is not emulation.

Edit: And Apple has already discussed how Rosetta2 handles complexities like self modifying code. It probably won’t help with performance but the M1 has a lot of power to keep even that code running fast.

But more importantly video/audio apps aren’t going to be using Rosetta2 for very long. 99% of code written for x86 MacOS is going to be a simple recompile to native, if not more. Not going native when your competitors did and got 2-5x faster is corporate suicide.

Most code? I would imagine that most code run on Apple laptops today would start with Safari. And then Slack, some IDEs, etc etc. These will all get ported extremely fast if they haven't already been.

There will be a long tail of edge case software that runs in emulation, but that won't affect the majority of users.

The windows market is all over the place. All the way from leftover bin junk from 5 years ago sold as new to high end cutting edge. When you get bellow 900 dollars the market decidedly on the crap side with respect to windows. There are some exceptions but usually you have to get 1200-1800 before you start get quality items. Not saying you can not find good stuff near the bottom. But you get what you pay for. Usually they skimp on the screen, memory, and disk. I am currently using an MSI stealth gaming laptop. other than the keyboard layout being slightly odd i am liking it a lot. i replaced my previous hp of 8 years. that will find a new home doing something else once I do a full teardown and repasting. luckily it is one of the last hp laptops where taking it apart is not a total nightmare. finding a decent laptop takes a lot of work. going with apple has a lot of advantages as the hassle of 'picking' is cut down to a few models, and you have a good shot of it being decent. I personally would not buy an apple but that is because of other 'petty' reasons and not quality.

Microbenchmarks are meaningless. Where are the benchmarks of real-world applications?

The old butterfly keyboard that was prone to failure is history.

I think for most power users, they probably generate significantly more than €73 in value from the computer every day (or maybe every hour), so they are probably not thinking too much about that savings.

(Of course, power savings are important in their own right for mobile / battery-operated use cases.)

Ah, you're right there. I didn't realize you could modify that.

Maybe, but distinct from real "gaming".

With iOS, you have to be an Apple developer paying $99/yr to do ad-hoc signing, I'm guessing it's the same now for MacOS..

Sounds like exactly the kind of thing you can optimize much easier when you control both the hardware and the software.

> Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps.

Won't this be handled by just porting V8 to the M1?

You can also buy some ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled now if you don't want to worry about hardware compatibility issues.

That's not how the long tail works. Any given esoteric piece of software won't be used by very many people, but very many people will use some esoteric piece of software.

You also have the problem with proprietary software that even if a port exists, it's not the version you have an existing license for, and you may not be able to afford a new laptop and all new software at the same time.

This is the actual JEP https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/391.

This is an early access build from today https://github.com/microsoft/openjdk-aarch64/releases/tag/16...

And then sit at a desk all day within reach of a power socket

I answered like that because of what looked like a snarky comment.

Maybe they have to run enterprise software which does not get updated every year so they can't use MacOS. Or perhaps they want a fully featured copy of Office? Maybe they want to run an Active Directory network? Maybe they like having ports on their laptop

Not only that, the first released version of NT on ARM was in 2012.

They had crappy code signing policies (only store apps on Windows RT tablet) which guaranteed poor adoption but that was a policy decision, not a technical one.

Oh yes. JS -> bytecode-> JIT for x64 -> interpreted and converted to ARM (both using CPU and memory).

And most use electron-builder which does not have Mac Arm support. Expect super slow mode for a while!

That's partially correct, and partially wrong. Long tail means that few people will buy/use a particular software package, but that if you have lots of such packages, you can make money. In the case of Apple Silicon, if there's an "esoteric" package, by definition it's only used by a small number of people.

I doubt that the M1 or M2 is going to have superior single core performance to the upcoming Zen4/5nm laptop chips.

Let alone multicore performance. Apple's core are also far behind in IO, 64GB of RAM and 4x Thunderbolt is less than what current gen laptop chips can do.

Yes, Apple SSDs are back on the leading edge, they were about half the speed of the fastest Gen4 SSDs.

Low RAM is still an issue with such fast SSDs, as someone who ran RAID0 Gen3 NVMe SSDs (so equivalent to what's in there).

This. The amount of times I've truly needed more then a couple of hours of battery life are rare. I think most people think they want more battery life when they really don't need it. Just add more cooling to stop those processors from throttling all the time.

An ARM version of Windows has existed for almost a decade. In fact it's running on quite a few laptops right now.

A game is a game. There is no "real gaming". Apple Arcade with a Xbox controller paired to a Mac is actually a fun gaming device for some types of gamers.

Genshin Impact is a great game that is on iOS in addition to "real consoles". Oceanhorn 2 is an amazing game that was originally on Apple Arcade and brought to Nintendo's "real console".

There is also quite a number of ports that I think you aren't aware of.

I agree that Zen4 should be comparable, but it also will cost 4X to make, and more to implement since it doesn’t include RAM.

The M1 is a system on a chip, with all the benefits and drawbacks of that including RAM and port limits.

The next releases will likely be A) a tweaked M1 for higher end PowerBooks with more RAM and ports and B) a desktop version with plenty of ports, significantly higher clock speeds, and off chip RAM.

I think there will always be faster CPUs out there, but not remotely near the M series in power per watt, and cost per power.

There is a difference between Tetris on Facebook versus Dota or CSGO on PC. The later is "real gaming", the former not. The border might be a gradient.

It's like calling yourself a programmer because you can set a timer on your VCR. (dated but still accurate)

And since when CSGO is a GPU-demanding game?

You think "real games" are for "hard triers only", but it's just your point of view.

That's not true at all. You can use recovery mode to trivially revert back to the OS that was installed when the computer was purchased. If that's pre-Mojave then you can just upgrade back to Mojave afterwards.

The claim of no AAA gaming is totally uncertain -- Apple seems to think that you'll be able to run games in Rosetta with better performance than what you can get on the existing 16" Macs. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but if these new Macs really are so great, I'd expect devs to start porting their games.

Rosetta2 is emulation just as much as qemu and Dolphin are emulation, both of which also use binary translation like every other modern emulator. Apple marketing just doesn't want you to call Rosetta2 an emulator because "emulators are slow". Anything running software on a different architecture is an emulator.

If you read my parent comment you'll see how DAWs are going to be using Rosetta2 for years to come, maybe even a decade, for many people. Even if there are ARM versions, you won't be able to use them until all your dozens if not hundreds of plug-ins, some of which won't be actively developed any more or will require a re-purchase for an ARM version, have also migrated.

People invested in such ecosystems aren't just going to up and give up half their collection of software, or spend thousands re-purchasing upgrades to get ARM versions.

What if the Mac had a newer OS than Mojave originally installed on it? That is how I interpreted the parent poster's comment. Given this interpretation, I'm don't think I'd have the expectation to be able to install an earlier OS.

That's a microbenchmark. There are a myriad reasons why one specific thing might be faster under a new CPU even under emulation. That doesn't mean other things won't be much slower.

With that interpretation, you'd be correct but I don't think you've ever been able to downgrade to something earlier than what it came with since the older OS wouldn't include the appropriate drivers or kexts to properly run the hardware.

Mine and many others. Rightfully so, see the example.

GPU was not the issue here.

Since 1997 to be exact. WinCE ran on arm since time immemorial.

That's not true. Anyone with an Apple ID is able to sign software they build/binaries and install them on their iOS devices.

Although instead of lasting 1 year they only last 7 days, but there is no fee for a user to sign and install their own binaries.

Zen is also an SoC, but with off-chip memory, this brings other advantages.

Most importantly, Zen 4 is a chiplet design, so for the same amount of cores it will be cheaper to make than the M1 chip.

As for performance per watt, Renoir in low power configurations matches the A12. I would really doubt that a laptop Zen 4 on 5nm LPP wouldn't pass the M1/M2 in both performance and performance per watt, because Renoir is on 7nm with an older uArch and gets close.

My question was about MacOS and if similar behaviour exists there too with the M1 Macs.

To clarify iOS, so the app erases itself after 7 days? Or is it something like you can install an app for only 7 days after downloading/using Xcode?

Apple has had support for game pads for a while now. This will just make it more viable.

The only issue might be multi-touch based games on M1

can you recommend one? all the ones i've found have horrible reviews

Can be ad-hoc? For how long?

Like Surface laptops?

Cite?

I guess that may count for you, but I mean lockdowns within the OS itself.

I don't care that I can't run Linux on my Mac. If I wanted to run Linux, I'd have different hardware.

To answer my own question, an ad-hoc signed iOS App will deactivate after 7 days unless you pay $99/yr. This behaviour is not present on Big Sur and likely M1 Macs, they can still run notarized and non-notarized apps: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/macos-11-0-big-sur-t...

> Exactly. So it was never really the hardware that held back gaming on Mac, but the fact that from a game-development perspective it's an esoteric platform that has limited or no support for the main industry standard APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, etc).

I think it's more that gaming wasn't held back on the Mac. It was just bootcamp was much more common than people think.

> If you're going to port your game to iOS (and why not? It's a huge platform with powerful GPUs and a huge, "spendy" market)

Because mobile gaming and desktop gaming have very little in common. Note that Nintendo didn't port their titles when they released iOS games, they made new games. Users want different experiences, and flat ports of successful console gaming titles to iOS tend to fail. There are, all told, very few ports of successful PC/console games to iOS, and those that exist tend to be brand reuse rather than literal ports.

> then you basically get Mac for free with close to zero additional effort.

Not even remotely. The way you secure your service has to be totally different, the UI paradigm is completely different, you have to cope with totally different aspect ratios etc etc. It's significant effort, and it will be very hard to justify for most game studios. It's certainly more work in most cases than porting a Windows game to MacOS was when using a mainstream engine, and that was not a huge market.

The ROI for battery life falls off at a certain point, right? For phones, it's probably about a day -- how often is it a problem to plug in your phone at some point in a 24-hour period? -- and for laptops it's often about a full workday, 8-10 hours. I'm not saying that a 20-hour laptop battery isn't an incredible accomplishment, but I do think that I care a lot less about 20 vs 10 hours than I do about 10 vs 5.

So the choice is between running an older OS version that will go EOL sooner, or abandoning the ability to dual-boot? How is that OK?

"Video editors" are going to buy a machine with 8GB RAM? (Which, I assume, will be soldered to the motherboard, like all recent Apple products.) Good luck to them, I guess.

Still doesn't account for desktop devices. And no, it's not a given that every desktop mac user has a Magic Trackpad.

>- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows

This has been a claim made about the Macs since the T2 chip came out. It was strictly false then (you just had to boot into Recovery Mode and turn off the requirement that OSes had to be signed by Apple to boot) and we still don't know for sure now. Apple has stated in their WWDC that they're still using SecureBoot, so it's likely that we can again just turn off Apple signature requirements in Recovery Mode and boot into ARM distros.

Whether or not that experience will be good is another thing entirely, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple made it a bitch and a half for driver devs to make the experience usable at all.

>- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines

True, but this isn't a strictly unsolvable limitation of AS and more like one of those teething pains you have to deal with, as it is the first-generation chip in an ISA shift. By this logic, you could say that make doesn't even work yet. Give it some time. In a few months I expect all of these quirks to be ironed out. Although, I suppose if you're concerned about containers it sounds like you want to be in the server market, not the laptop market.

>- only 2 thunderbolt ports, limited to 16GB RAM, no external gpu support/drivers, can't use nvidia or amd cards, can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

See above about "give it some time".

>- no AAA gaming

I mean, if you're concerned about gaming, you shouldn't buy any Mac at all. Nor should you be in the laptop market, really. Although, this being said, the GPU in the new M1 is strong enough to be noted. In the Verge's benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running on the M1 MacBook Air at 38FPS at 1920x1200. Yes, it was at very low settings, but regardless – this is a playable framerate of a modern triple-A game, in a completely fanless ultrabook ... running through a JIT instruction set translation layer.

>- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

I disagree. I know we were talking about the M1 specifically, but Apple has shown that the future of ARM on desktop doesn't have to be as dismal as Windows made it out to be. Teething pains aside, the reported battery life and thermal performance on the new AS machines have been absurdly fantastic. I think, going down the road, we'll stop seeing x86 CPUs on all energy-minded machines like laptops entirely.

Benchmarks are now out, and x86 Chrome is faster on the M1 MacBook Air than the x86 MacBook Air.