Lol the best laptop review ever.
@Vitaliy_Kiselev wrt your latest Skynet painting. I actually feel much the same, but it's a separate thread and argument. I can run Resolve and FCPX on their system and nothing else - treat it like the appliance it is, like a linear editing system from the 80's. We still have the choice to compartmentalize. You remind me of RMS somehow (Stallman), I met him back in 1996 at a conference. All his points were correct, and he wore sandals with mismatched socks.
Small info for people wanting M1
As far as my info goes - all USB and Thunderbolt ports on M1 machines go directly inside M1 CPU.
This means that static discharge or anything similar can kill instantly all your PC (and warranty does not work in such case).
Apple usually install ports protection,m but it works only in some cases and does not work in many others (especially in case of not good USB-C connector or dirt in it).
In older machines you can replace intermediary chip and all will be nice again, CPU is intact.
I think you do not get the point.
Apple is making unprecedented closed and encrypted ecosystem, making repairs, upgrades, info restoration almost impossible. It is made with such intention, not by accident. This system will very soon start to channel all your coordinates, files, apps and anything that government would like to see (same way as any NSA or CIA guy can now dig up into your iCloud backup on daily basis). And you won't be able to fight with it, nor disable it.
Main issue with tests is that they are leading to the biggest tragedy in computer industry. Where presstitutes and paid for bloggers, as well as narrow specialists (who constantly tell you how politics are bad) are leading horde to the cliff.
You are not just getting another Mac, you are sponsoring new infrastructure. Where you will be that fish on a dish.
It won't be abstract Skynet, it will be Google and Apple in very near time who will operate strike drones above your house and whom will routinely inform you each day that "such and such" had been detected as dangerous and disturbing for stability (add here new stuff like "had new dangerous strain of COVID 2021", and such), but our system prevented bad consequences, please watch the nice hole in place of his house.
Developers I talk about told that especially since late 2019 Apple tone inside turned almost literally to Nazi like style. Where people who do not agree with course (including political course, racial course), who not agree with horrible decisions are being treated like enemies.
@Vitaliy_Kiselev I get and appreciate the technical points you make (i.e. the microarchitecture isn't as good as they make it to be, time will tell), however from a pro user perspective (specifically our niche) I cannot but feel you are being biased. I've never ever owned (or used) an Apple (hardware) product, as a consumer or as a pro user. The closest to their ecosystem I came was with a Bella keyboard, which was a jog/wheel keyboard for FCP (which I ran on a Hackintosh back in the day, when old school FCP was king).
What do we care about as users, pro or not? Results. So if a chip/finished product comes along in a compelling package and at a compelling price point, and performs better than its contemporary peers, do I cherish the render times or do I bitch about how probably much of it is due to h.264/h.265 hardware encoding, already included in the admission price?
Render times like the ones above make me interested for the first time in a Macbook Pro, and their future iMac. It's about the whole package and how it fits one's use cases. I'm old enough to have worked on SPARCstations in the early '90s. Did we cherish the neat pizza box form factor, or that it ran well CAD/EDA design software? "Why not both?", as a certain young lady would say.
Small fun fact
Around 85% of all computers used to develop Mac and iOS software are hackintoshes (in mid to large companies).
With COVID it become even more. For some firms outside US it is close to 100%.
Move to their own silicone will allow Apple to get their hand on this nice high marginal market as they will be blocking their newer tools to work on non Apple hardware.
In order to ensure security and continuing stability....
Some people love to show this
It is just one issue - Intel expanses on desktop CPU cores had been around 1/5-1/50 during this chart time of expenses Apple made on their main LSI.
All is super inconsistent
As I being told it is VERY important to not hit any filter or operation that is CPU intensive for M1 to be good.
Hence almost all FCP tests Apple asked to make are simple transitions and small color adjustments, plus fast hardware accelerated compression.
Same wrong benchmark approach
Throttling
Idea to show build with lot of small files as independent CPU test, it is not
He should use identical external fast Thunderbolt SSD.
Render time is nice, but it is also not all CPU cores, it is media accelerator job to do encoding and GPU all else
Premiere is not very nice for now due to not using GPU and accelerator as needed
Games suck as GPU small and is mobile class
Battery life claims are false
So, nice and coordinated with Apple review, as it is not made for so hardcore Apple fans
Reviews stink
It is like bunch of idiots who make them.
Also they try now to prize such SSD speeds - 256 GB SSD
Note that ti is useless SLC cache speeds, not normal test, and it is nothing to write home about.
Geekbench is officially recommended benchmark for reviewers by Apple
Ignore its results!
https://www.engadget.com/apple-macbook-air-m1-review-140031323.html
It is on benchmark.
As I said, all top hardware firms do this, and all big benchmark authors LIVE on this.
But they also have special schemes to making it almost impossible to catch them legally. As I understand Apple people working on it are not legally working at Apple or their direct contractor at the time. And code transitions and transfers, as well as discussion, happen very similar to how CIA agents communicate on foreign soil.
So, even if it'll be huge leak and scandal - benchmark author just declare that it is their new contractors team working at adding support for new processor and go prove otherwise.
DxO is very famous for helping adjust and optimize for their photo and video benchmarks (it means that they tell intricate details on how to do this).
AnTuTu for example had been hunted by Google on request of Qualcomm and other US companies, as it is not controlled by US and EU company.
@Vitaliy_Kiselev wrt "where on one top benchmark like Cinebench you can have up to 100 developers working each day for 4-5 months on very small amount of code." If that optimization effort is only towards the benchmark code path, then it can be easily considered cheating.
If OTOH it benefits the app as a whole, then I don't know (as long as they do it for Resolve too lol), I mean the users of Cinebench won't mind the performance increase. I get your point that those VLIW instructions wouldn't have been issued by the compiler, but that speaks more of the compiler than anything else. I wouldn't consider Intel's and AMD's involvement with optimizing external libraries and games as cheating.
Some more on Apple methods
The first footnote on their website (Mini page) - they measured performance per watt as peak (!) performance to average (!) power consumption.
This is scam, guys.
Let me explain.
Average developer is using available info and almost same code across platforms.
Apple with benchmarks use ALL 100% private info they have about their CPUs, they hand optimize every instruction and every loop, if some jump makes hit due to wrong branch prediction - they rewrite it so branch prediction makes proper guess. It is no longer some C code, but huge amount of ARM low level assembler inserts that are also using all VLIW instructions such a way that is impossible to reach by compiler itself.
It is very complex process, where on one top benchmark like Cinebench you can have up to 100 developers working each day for 4-5 months on very small amount of code.
Btw, AMD also did the same thing (with much smaller scale) with their latest Ryzen processors for top benchmarks and around 30-40 top games. So it is not only efficiency of CPUs that is rising, it is also huge efforts being pushed into optimization of core code components, including popular libraries. Intel also has thousands of developers working on such things in tight tandem with benchmarks, games and scientific packages developers.
@Vitaliy_Kiselev When you write "worked with all major benchmark makers to write totally custom code for M1."
should I take that along the lines of #ifdef __arm_M1, where the code is optimized for the architecture (unified memory, etc), but otherwise functionally identical? Of course you can't answer this first hand. That's not something to blame them for, it's like seeing #ifdef __sparcv9 in old code. Until their architecture is well known to developers, it's understandable they'd be eager to put their best foot forward. Unless there's cheating.
MacBook Pro results
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