Experiencing the M1 Mac

[Joelist]

Back to the main article.

1) I actually am not enthralled with Apple the company. They have a certain tendency towards wokeness that is annoying to say the least. Then again, if you work for who I remember then your employer is up there on the woke mountaintop too

2) There is a big difference between TPMs and Apple's hardware approach to security. TPM is a Microsoft standard for a crypto processor and is a good idea as far as it goes. It is not necessarily present on all PCs but it at least is a step in the direction of hardware based security. And even TPM equipped machines do not have special separate physical memory for storing security information. Apple's approach with its Secure Enclave and separate coprocessing block is present in all Macs and all iPads and iPhones. Oh, and Apple started this approach years ago so they are not late to the part

Fact-checking the performance claims you made for the M1 vs i9 and Ryzen chips. These are actual benchmarks:

How Apple's M1 performs against Intel 11th-gen and AMD Ryzen 4000

We put the PC's best laptops against MacBook Pro M1 to see if Apple's new ARM chip really is all that.

www.pcworld.com

Cinebench (for running the 3D modeling software Cinema4D. There are lots of other benchmark charts on this site, and the M1 does not come in at the top of any of them, or even second or third. Just sayin!

View attachment 35611

Cinebench is a GPU metric.

Plus PC world is a joke site.

 

[Joelist]

Ananatech is a far superior site with an actual reputation for deep dives on processors:

The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

www.anandtech.com

And when looking at this stuff remember M1 is roughly a 20W part and the competition is in the 75W+ range.

 

[Joelist]

Note the single core score. M1 beats everything there. The only units that beat it are in multicore and have a lot more cores and are FAR more power hungry. When your 75W+ desktop part is being beat by or is in a close race with a tiny 20W part it bears examination.

 

[Overmind One]

Be careful about Netmarketshare. On their own site they state that that tool is no longer supported and stopped getting data last October.

IDC has the more current information but it is behind a paywall. I found out about it from a quote in an IT journal about Apple's Mac market share hitting 23%.

Please post that. I actually searched several sources, and not one of them has ever had Apple products (including it's largest revenue stream which is iPhones) reaching more than 15% of market share for any product they make. Not ever, in the entirety of it's existence. Even in the cellphone market, they are third behind Huawei and Samsung. They excel in making money, not selling laptops or even iPhones. They sell lower-end hardware for exceedingly high profit, and really good hardware for exceedingly large profits. A Mac Pro costs $5000, but can be outperformed by a $2500 PC laptop with an Nvidia 2080 and 16gb of RAM running an i7 (not even an i9!). They have made themselves a $2 TRILLION dollar company by extracting profits from making average hardware for cheap but selling it in a premium look and a rarefied price. There is no other way to make those profits.

Statista (market share for iPhone):

Apple iPhone market share 2007-2023 | Statista

Apple claimed a 24.7 percent share of the market in the fourth quarter of 2023, an increase from the previous quarter.

www.statista.com

 

[Joelist]

Okay, where was I.

I don't especially like Apple the company. Much like the company you currently work for they are pretty woke and it is annoying. That said, I DO like their silicon group because it is a group of very creative people. In fact, a lot of them were poached from Intel Israel by Apple (including the head of the Silicon team Johnny Srouji - one of the inventors of Core 2). And as someone who finds things like microarchitectures interesting I find M1 and the A Series interesting because they have made a quantum jump in speed and efficiency.

As far as TPM and stuff, Apple's Secure Enclave approach is not brand new and has been around for years. It has advantages over the TPM approach in that the Operating System has no way to access anything in the enclave and the enclave cannot be accessed remotely - it requires physical interaction. Both however are good in that they move towards hardware based security.

I will dig up the IT Journal. IDC I was unwilling to pay for to see stats. Here's one:

What does Apple's enterprise growth mean for IT administrators? [Q&A]

The use of Apple devices in the enterprise has grown exponentially over the past year. In fact, a recent report from IDC showed that macOS was the operating system of choice for 23 percent of computers at US companies with 1,000 employees or more in 2020, up from 17 percent in 2019.

betanews.com

 

[Overmind One]

Ananatech is a far superior site with an actual reputation for deep dives on processors:

The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

www.anandtech.com

And when looking at this stuff remember M1 is roughly a 20W part and the competition is in the 75W+ range.

Where are the comparisons to the i7/i9 and Ryzen? The only actual value of any processor or computing platform is it's usability and application by the end-user. Apple products just don't deliver as much. Even it's original preferred sphere in the creatives market has seen a greater growth in PC computers vs Mac. Mostly because younger folks have less money to spend on Apple products, and those who do buy them find themselves unable to efficiently run the most widely-used game development platforms, if at all. I am talking about Unity and Unreal. The Microsoft Surface Studio is hands down the king of the modern Game DevOps houses. Apple makes nothing to compete with it. And there is the illustrator's favorite peripheral, the WACOM drawing tablet. They are buggy or just plain unusable on most Mac computers, including the Mac Pro. So, they get connected to XPS or Alienware Dev computers or Microsoft Surface Studio.

Like I said before, Apples are cool! But they are neither the best nor the most powerful. In my opinion, they do not represent a good value, even If I think they are absolutely gorgeous.

 

[Joelist]

Just for fun I ran this right now....on battery.

 

[Joelist]

i7 and Ryzen are right in there. It beats them. In several different benches. And M1 is the LOW end of the Apple Silicon line and a 10-20W part. Yet it is beating or very close to parts using 4-5 times the power. The microarchitecture is scalable and next Friday is the rollout of the next tier which is expected to double the Core counts on CPU, GPU and ML. If it scales in a linear fashion the results will be insane.

Remember I usually am an Intel person and also a fan of Surface - remember I wrote a big long technical breakdown of the Surface 3 Pro on this forum? I like the idea of Surface where it gives the user a "clean" Windows experience without the bloatware OEMs infest systems with. But one thing it struggles with (and why Microsoft is even starting to look into custom CPUs) is Intel and AMDs increasing issues with thermals and performance throttling. So when I see someone actually tackle these issues head on and win I cheer them on.

 

[Overmind One]

i7 and Ryzen are right in there. It beats them. In several different benches. And M1 is the LOW end of the Apple Silicon line and a 10-20W part. Yet it is beating or very close to parts using 4-5 times the power. The microarchitecture is scalable and next Friday is the rollout of the next tier which is expected to double the Core counts on CPU, GPU and ML. If it scales in a linear fashion the results will be insane.

Remember I usually am an Intel person and also a fan of Surface - remember I wrote a big long technical breakdown of the Surface 3 Pro on this forum? I like the idea of Surface where it gives the user a "clean" Windows experience without the bloatware OEMs infest systems with. But one thing it struggles with (and why Microsoft is even starting to look into custom CPUs) is Intel and AMDs increasing issues with thermals and performance throttling. So when I see someone actually tackle these issues head on and win I cheer them on.

The Surface machines have some drawbacks, but the Microsoft Surface Studio is a very purpose built workstation. They are incredible. The closest thing Apple makes to it is the iMac. But only in size. Apple still has not embraced touch screens or active stylus integration. These are what you see in DevOps, but 5 years ago it was Macs.

I hate to keep pointing this out, but Apple is just not at the top of it's game in any market or hardware spec or application. It really does not matter how good the processor does on the benchmarks. It does matter if it can run 3D modeling programs, game and software development platforms, VR headsets and VR development platforms for medical and scientific research, finance, space industry, military applications, etc etc etc etc. Apple is nowhere in any of that. It never will be. You can trot out performance specs all you want, but if Apple is sitting at a global market percentage of under 10%, that is really not saying much is it?

It must be embarrassing for kids who have $3000 Apple laptops to be upstaged at friends' homes by PCs costing a quarter of the price when playing games that can't even be installed on a Mac. Or, to be a graphics creative with a Mac and be hired into a company creative department and find themselves unable to run the programs used in the department (I get this one a lot). We do have some eGPU units to get around the graphics limitations of Apple products, but you can only do so much. SLI and dual graphics card setups are just not possible with anything made by Apple, including even the most esoteric Mac Pro builds.

 

[Joelist]

Only time will tell. M1 only came on the scene 6 months ago. I am not really into internet arguing I admit - I value friendships too much to strain them especially over stuff like computers.

 

[Overmind One]

Only time will tell. M1 only came on the scene 6 months ago. I am not really into internet arguing I admit - I value friendships too much to strain them especially over stuff like computers.

It's an awesome chip! It will free Apple from dependence on Intel chips or any other chip architecture, and it allows Apple to move forward on the chip design without any interference or issues with licensing. It gives them an excellent mobile processor to use in their upcoming VR platform and also in the Apple TV. It will even allow them to license the use of the chip in other manufacturers' products. I think that this is a huge milestone for them. But just for them. It is not a PC or Intel killer processor, and because Apple remains in the rarified "overpriced" zone, it's market share will still be small. But Apple can make even more profit than before.

My stance on Apple, based upon technical aspects alone, is that Apple products are well made, exceptionally well designed and beautiful. They are relatively dependable and very capable. Also, they are not the best, not the fastest or most powerful, and you can outperform them with PCs costing much less. All is true of Apple. When it comes to repeating the marketing claims they make about their products and the Apple technique of using clever wording and measuring their advances on THEIR previous products, I am always going to push back and expose it if posted here.

Example: The Huawei Matebook X Pro at $1500.00 running an i7 with 16gb of RAM has higher overall specs and a sharper display than the 2021 Apple Macbook Pro and costs over $1000 less. But Apple will compare it's latest M1-based laptops to it's own Macbooks in the marketing.