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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 2 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.555s | source
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faitswulff ◴[12 Nov 20 04:22 UTC] No.25066407[source]▶
This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head. Now Apple computers are a premium product from a performance perspective, as well.
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totalZero ◴[12 Nov 20 06:30 UTC] No.25067074[source]▶
Not quite. You can't synthetically compare one chip to another and draw organic conclusions. Apple computers with M1 don't support the software that I use. That's why I bought a fully spec'd Intel MBP13 today. All this talk about battery life and benchmarks gets flipped on its head when I can't use the product in the real world.
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manojlds ◴[12 Nov 20 07:00 UTC] No.25067232[source]▶
Isn't there Rosetta that they talked about?
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totalZero ◴[12 Nov 20 13:40 UTC] No.25069704[source]▶
It's an emulator, not a panacea.

"Rosetta is meant to ease the transition to Apple silicon, giving you time to create a universal binary for your app. It is not a substitute for creating a native version of your app.”

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

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1. manojlds ◴[12 Nov 20 14:38 UTC] No.25070327[source]▶
It's a stop gap yes, but I am replying to someone that said their apps will not run on these new machines.

And check my reply to a sibling comment where people are finding cases where Rosetta is faster than native.

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2. totalZero ◴[13 Nov 20 03:32 UTC] No.25078505[source]▶
Actually, you're replying to me. Check the usernames.

You can't run Windows on these things, and Rosetta 2 doesn't fully support kexts, VMs, or certain instruction sets. It's a translator and it's going to be imperfect in practice. That's why it's not intended to supplant development with native instructions.

Your other comment is a tweet regarding one function that is speculatively faster, but tells me nothing about real-world performance -- nor whether the tools I use for my business are going to be supported by Apple Silicon in the next few months.