I remember the hype around the first M1 and getting one and it actually living up to the hype! It was compiling code twice as fast as the MBP I replaced and was booting way faster and was generally snappier in every way. I ran through lots of benchmarks but also tested on my own code. It was faster than the beefy servers I deployed to.
But the absolute biggest game changer was that it was silent. Completely silent. Hadn’t realised how noisy computers had been until then.
I dipped my toes in the water with literally the cheapest M1 I could buy…the base model Mac Mini was on sale for $499 so I sort of impulse bought it to see if it could replace my PC. I was blown away by the performance of this tiny little machine, even with just 8GB of RAM. I’ve since went all in with a M3 Pro MacBook Pro and its performance and battery life are insane. M1 and beyond definitely live up to the hype.
i was as impressed by gaming. being able to run a triple a game like resident evil 4 with everything turned to max on a mac laptop was something new to me.
You can make a pretty silent desktop (more space for heat pipes and large cooling blocks). But I had a Lenovo laptop that was recommended during a Linux excursion and it was loud as well, getting the M1 Air after that was bliss.
I think it'll be a long time until we see an inflection point like that [1].
I also had a Ryzen 3700X, high-end CPU and case fans to make it somewhat quiet under load. Then I got the MacBook Air M1, which was as fast in multi-core use, but felt much faster in daily use to much better single thread performance (turns out that large builds spend quite some time on portions where everything blocks on one unit and the amount of parallelism is 1). And it was completely quiet (no fan).
The Air M1 felt like magic at the time, I could have the power of the 3700X on the train and insanely long battery life.
[1] That said, I got an M3 Pro for work and my private laptop has an M1 Pro and the difference in single-thread performance is certainly noticeable.
If only Apple allowed to run VMs and other software like Linux on their iPads, it would be a game-changer. Right now, the iPads are mostly limited to media production tools + everything else you could get in an Android tablet, so it's pretty pointless for a user like me
If the tablet form factor was really a game changer for software development, wouldn’t the surface line and high end android tablets be more popular for programming?
Wouldn’t there actually be some popular Linux tablets out there? (I am aware that there are a couple of niche options)
Touch screen interfaces are just not good for programming. Apple already brought all of the useful parts of the iPad to the Mac when they switched to the m series SOCs. Fanless design, long battery life, instant sleep/wake.
An iPad running macOS has some niche appeal for people who want to travel light but I really don’t see it being a game changer at all.
> If the tablet form factor was really a game changer for software development, wouldn’t the surface line and high end android tablets be more popular for programming?
Not necessarily. The surface line has several hardware fumbles (especially regarding power budgets/efficiency). The A & M series chips could easily whip up most of their competition in the low power (>10 watt) segment, if Apple wanted. AMD and Intel push for high performance at 15-28watts on portables, which is too high for thin tablets.
For maximum contrast: x86 tablets have fans. M1/m2 laptops can be fanless.
(This isn’t to say it’s impossible but rather no company with deep enough pockets cares enough.)
I used an iPad+ssh for programming with a detached Bluetooth keyboard for a while. It was great.
It was much lighter than what I have now, a 2-in-1 with a fold-back keyboard. This opened up possibilities like using a car suction cup mount and a lap desk to get a slightly taller computer while on the couch. Or a lightweight armature.
Plus, vertical orientation on a “laptop” felt really novel and nice. My 2-in-1 can be vertical, but it is clearly an afterthought. The iPad ~4:3 aspect ratio is much nicer for vertical use, and there’s something about the pixel alignment or maybe the screen viewing angles… my laptop screen doesn’t work quite as well sideways.
I switched because I missed i3wm mostly, and generally all of the local Linux software. But no complaints about the hardware.
I agree regarding the touch interface, but look at the steam deck example, connect it to some monitors and peripherals using Type-C and you have a computing monster that you can use for everything. And having the portability + other programs like final cut and w/e accessible right at your fingers is amazing!
If they could combine iPadOS and macOS, and have some clever way to flick between the iPad UI and the mac one, it would be an incredible device
Plug it into a usb-c dock connected to a screen/keyboard/mouse and it's a Mac, put it on the little stand with the magic keyboard and it's a MacBook, hold it in your hand and it's an iPad
Have we forgotten the cautionary tale of Steve Ballmer's Windows Phone boondoggle already? Ballmer wanted to use the same codebase for desktops, laptops, phones and tablets.
It goes back further than that too. Microsoft bought the Sidekick and squandered their lead by bringing it onto the Microsoft platform.
I'm reminded of this quote: "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds."
Laptops and tablets are different devices. We should stop trying to merge them. Every time we do, we end up with something that is a worse version of both things. Tablets need a battery. If the display is detachable, then that creates a weight problem for the laptop. The tablet keyboard is worse than any laptop keyboard.
I said over a decade ago I thought Apple was smart to just have a tablet OS as well as OSX. Don't spend 3 years trying to merge those things. It's a waste of time and gains you nothing. Even the tablet and phone OSs are somewhat distinct (but a lot less so than with OSX).
I always thought Eric Schmidt (at the time) did the right thing with ChromeOS and Android too. There were always questions from people seeking faux "consistency" like "why have 2 OSs? Shouldn't we merge them?" Again, phones and laptops are different things. Let each OS evolve and see if one emerges as a "winner". Otherwise, leave them alone.
Chrome OS does a fairly decent job with the transition now. I used to use a Lenovo Duet at times. If you had the keyboard / touchpad attached, it would go into the usual desktop mode with floating windows. If it was just the tablet, then windows would tile. Gestures for the usual tasks. It wasn't a complicated system but it did work fairly smoothly.
And then there were the checkboxes which allowed you to extend the OS beyond Chrome OS's initial limitations. Enable Android. Enable Linux. Enable developer mode. But the user (or administrator) could ignore those checkboxes and keep the machine in a fairly locked down state.
Keep imagining a similar abilities on iPads. A seamless transition from desktop mode to touch and back again. With options allowing you to make it into more of a general purpose computer if you want. But the options can be ignored in favor of the walled garden, if that's what the user or school or corporate owners want.
Easy porting would make everything slower. People would stop targeting Apple hardware and the machines would be running everything in emulation. Making porting difficult is a strategy. It requires publishers to make the leap and when they do they take full advantage of the hardware.
As much as I'd like to see it being more open, a lot of people seem concerned about security and are happy with the current state of iOS/iPadOs and not having to deal with troubleshooting of their families devices
I seriously hope that this is getting announced at WWDC this year. There is nothing obvious stopping these iPads from running Virtualization.Framework.
Not officially. You can side load UTM using AltStore which requires you to sign apps using your own developer certificate and re-sign them about once a week to keep it running.
The iPads have had the hardware in the M-series chips and the software in the form of Apple's hypervisor framework in iPadOS for a couple of generations now, but Apple hasn't enabled it to be used officially.
I really wish they would just allow this on iPadOS. It still maintains the sandbox model Apple wants for iOS, it would just give a (contained) outlet for doing things that are difficult in native iPadOS.
Sidecar sort of does this right now? If you are fine with the iPad functioning as a low res display that the Mac can send a few windows over to. It doesn't work amazingly well for me but I have used it a few times.
I don't understand why the non-Apple world has been so slow to copy Apple here. Are there any Windows or Linux laptops that match even the oldest M1 machines in battery life and performance?
I get that Apple has an advantage over companies like Dell and Lenovo in that they also build the OS but then there are Linux computer companies that have the source for everything and their machines are usually even worse from a performance / watt perspective.
The other CPU catch back after several months, the Apple Silicon is a good marketing prowess, the reality is that Apple CPUs wins because they are the first on to be produced on a new lithography node, because Apple can book a larger quantity than anyone else.
When the other CPU manufacturer produce CPUs on the same CPU node, the performance is matched.
I find this decision to put it in the iPad Pro somewhat puzzling. One consequence of this is that nobody is going to want to buy M3 MacBooks for a while, knowing that such a big leap in performance is around the corner.
Does Apple really sell more iPad Pros than MacBooks to make it worthwhile? I was under the impression that the iPad Pro is a somewhat niche product and the Air is far more popular.
> One consequence of this is that nobody is going to want to buy M3 MacBooks for a while, knowing that such a big leap in performance is around the corner.
I think this is one of those things that only enthusiasts care about, and if you care that much about performance you’re probably one of the people who buys a new one every year or two anyways so they aren’t really missing out on your revenue.
Most people just need or want a new laptop and order whatever one is currently available.
I think the theory is that there is going to be a large on-device AI push at WWDC. And iPads generally have a very long refresh cycle. In order for iPads to participate, they needed the M4's.
I think it makes total sense. I speculate the M4 might be too expensive to manufacture for a MBA right now. The iPad Pro is a relatively niche, slow cycle and high-margin product.
People who buy MacBooks aren't suddenly going to stop or switch to Windows because of some Osborne effect. The entry-level M3 MBA is still extremely hard to beat at the same price point.
AFAICT, Apple has three major advantages (note that architecture only has minor impact [1])
- first access to the best process
- a great team
- high bandwidth / latency DRAM
Intel & AMD aren't that far behind on #1 and #2, but I'm surprised at how long it's taking them to catch up on #3. If they created and sold a chip with wide low latency DRAM on package they would simultaneously significantly increase their performance and also they would capture a higher proportion of the BOM cost of a laptop.
Pedantic: AMD's MI300X has on package RAM, but it's not exactly a laptop chip...
I think most of us want an iPad that we can dock into a connected keyboard and use as a laptop. But from Apple's point of view they really need to sell us multiple devices.
They'll do what every vendor does; find that one workload that it's better at, and play that off as if it's that performant at every workload. Bad at 3DMark? Try Cinebench, Superposition, PCMark, Geekbench, SiSoftware Sandra, or even some other customer benchmarking software no one else uses.
but consumers do? (almost) Nobody will pay apple level prices for something that has less software support and, overall, a worse experience than on macos. TBH, other than gaming, not sure why anyone is paying 1k+ for a Windows laptop.
M series have always been extremely competitive on single-core, but not really "the champ". Now this one is beating the Core i9-14900KS in a device with only modest copper heatsinking (with a heatsink likely less than 3mm thick)! That merits the article title.
M1 Max beat 5950X in overall single-threaded SPEC2017 when it came out. It won big in some MT workloads too.
Punching within its own weight class, laptop chips rather than expecting it to outright beat desktop chips... it beat the 5980HS and 11980HK in every single test.
It just didn't sink into the public consciousness too well at that point because everyone assumed it must have been some erroneous test/outlier.
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But the absolute biggest game changer was that it was silent. Completely silent. Hadn’t realised how noisy computers had been until then.
I also had a Ryzen 3700X, high-end CPU and case fans to make it somewhat quiet under load. Then I got the MacBook Air M1, which was as fast in multi-core use, but felt much faster in daily use to much better single thread performance (turns out that large builds spend quite some time on portions where everything blocks on one unit and the amount of parallelism is 1). And it was completely quiet (no fan).
The Air M1 felt like magic at the time, I could have the power of the 3700X on the train and insanely long battery life.
[1] That said, I got an M3 Pro for work and my private laptop has an M1 Pro and the difference in single-thread performance is certainly noticeable.
Wouldn’t there actually be some popular Linux tablets out there? (I am aware that there are a couple of niche options)
Touch screen interfaces are just not good for programming. Apple already brought all of the useful parts of the iPad to the Mac when they switched to the m series SOCs. Fanless design, long battery life, instant sleep/wake.
An iPad running macOS has some niche appeal for people who want to travel light but I really don’t see it being a game changer at all.
Not necessarily. The surface line has several hardware fumbles (especially regarding power budgets/efficiency). The A & M series chips could easily whip up most of their competition in the low power (>10 watt) segment, if Apple wanted. AMD and Intel push for high performance at 15-28watts on portables, which is too high for thin tablets.
For maximum contrast: x86 tablets have fans. M1/m2 laptops can be fanless.
(This isn’t to say it’s impossible but rather no company with deep enough pockets cares enough.)
It was much lighter than what I have now, a 2-in-1 with a fold-back keyboard. This opened up possibilities like using a car suction cup mount and a lap desk to get a slightly taller computer while on the couch. Or a lightweight armature.
Plus, vertical orientation on a “laptop” felt really novel and nice. My 2-in-1 can be vertical, but it is clearly an afterthought. The iPad ~4:3 aspect ratio is much nicer for vertical use, and there’s something about the pixel alignment or maybe the screen viewing angles… my laptop screen doesn’t work quite as well sideways.
I switched because I missed i3wm mostly, and generally all of the local Linux software. But no complaints about the hardware.
Plug it into a usb-c dock connected to a screen/keyboard/mouse and it's a Mac, put it on the little stand with the magic keyboard and it's a MacBook, hold it in your hand and it's an iPad
My dream device
It goes back further than that too. Microsoft bought the Sidekick and squandered their lead by bringing it onto the Microsoft platform.
I'm reminded of this quote: "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds."
Laptops and tablets are different devices. We should stop trying to merge them. Every time we do, we end up with something that is a worse version of both things. Tablets need a battery. If the display is detachable, then that creates a weight problem for the laptop. The tablet keyboard is worse than any laptop keyboard.
I said over a decade ago I thought Apple was smart to just have a tablet OS as well as OSX. Don't spend 3 years trying to merge those things. It's a waste of time and gains you nothing. Even the tablet and phone OSs are somewhat distinct (but a lot less so than with OSX).
I always thought Eric Schmidt (at the time) did the right thing with ChromeOS and Android too. There were always questions from people seeking faux "consistency" like "why have 2 OSs? Shouldn't we merge them?" Again, phones and laptops are different things. Let each OS evolve and see if one emerges as a "winner". Otherwise, leave them alone.
And then there were the checkboxes which allowed you to extend the OS beyond Chrome OS's initial limitations. Enable Android. Enable Linux. Enable developer mode. But the user (or administrator) could ignore those checkboxes and keep the machine in a fairly locked down state.
Keep imagining a similar abilities on iPads. A seamless transition from desktop mode to touch and back again. With options allowing you to make it into more of a general purpose computer if you want. But the options can be ignored in favor of the walled garden, if that's what the user or school or corporate owners want.
The iPads have had the hardware in the M-series chips and the software in the form of Apple's hypervisor framework in iPadOS for a couple of generations now, but Apple hasn't enabled it to be used officially.
I really wish they would just allow this on iPadOS. It still maintains the sandbox model Apple wants for iOS, it would just give a (contained) outlet for doing things that are difficult in native iPadOS.
M-series is so far ahead of the game than an air-cooled M4 has better single-core performance than the best desktop PC chip money can buy. Incredible.
I get that Apple has an advantage over companies like Dell and Lenovo in that they also build the OS but then there are Linux computer companies that have the source for everything and their machines are usually even worse from a performance / watt perspective.
Here Jim Keller explain why CPU architecture doesn't matter a lot in performance now: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...
Deleted Comment
Does Apple really sell more iPad Pros than MacBooks to make it worthwhile? I was under the impression that the iPad Pro is a somewhat niche product and the Air is far more popular.
I think this is one of those things that only enthusiasts care about, and if you care that much about performance you’re probably one of the people who buys a new one every year or two anyways so they aren’t really missing out on your revenue.
Most people just need or want a new laptop and order whatever one is currently available.
People who buy MacBooks aren't suddenly going to stop or switch to Windows because of some Osborne effect. The entry-level M3 MBA is still extremely hard to beat at the same price point.
Like how long? M4 MacBook Pros could in theory launch in a month (i.e. WWDC). That's worthwhile.
I think it's more likely that current owners of m3 macbooks will be enticed to buy m4 ipads and thus apple makes more money.
And owners of older macbooks would buy both the m3 macbook and the m4 ipad
It sounds backwards, but that's how the apple ecosystem works.
- first access to the best process
- a great team
- high bandwidth / latency DRAM
Intel & AMD aren't that far behind on #1 and #2, but I'm surprised at how long it's taking them to catch up on #3. If they created and sold a chip with wide low latency DRAM on package they would simultaneously significantly increase their performance and also they would capture a higher proportion of the BOM cost of a laptop.
Pedantic: AMD's MI300X has on package RAM, but it's not exactly a laptop chip...
1: Jim Keller https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...
Even without the M4 it would be awkward when those chips appear in the real World in real situations.
IMO some people inside Qualcomm have been stretching the truth way too much even internally.
I know us nerds aren’t the market, but an mATX motherboard with elite x for like $700-800 would be a seller.
The main issue with M series is that a much of performance comes from the memory and that is very expensive to scale.
That's is why Apple is still selling 8GB laptops.
Punching within its own weight class, laptop chips rather than expecting it to outright beat desktop chips... it beat the 5980HS and 11980HK in every single test.
It just didn't sink into the public consciousness too well at that point because everyone assumed it must have been some erroneous test/outlier.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...