Apple clearly has a huge advantage here with a cutting edge process and for all practical purposes unlimited money to throw at this. Their cash on hand is more than AMD s full market cap.

I bought a laptop with an AMD chip once, never again. Thing was a fire hazard.

Yeah, dude, we're all thinking. As a hands-on programmer-manager I can report that creating slides for the fundraising deck that'll raise money to pay you or writing that email about you taking bags of beef jerky home for your post-workout recovery meal can take as much sustained concentration as you spinning in your `while 1 { copy_compiler_error(); stack_overflow_it(); paste_code(); }` infinite loop.

I had a seriously nice mac mini taken off me once, got given a "new Mac Pro". Was huge downgrade, was not happy.

I think next go round I'm going to get a desktop replacer style laptop and see if I can get best of both worlds.

I don't really care about portability and thus use a desktop but I do want to sit outside or work from the couch sometimes.

Maybe they will integrate wireless charging into the laptops soon?

With a true 'all day' battery, you'll probably only plug it in at a desk where tripping or knocking things over isn't an issue. While travelling, you just charge it at night or when you aren't using it. Much more like smartphone usage.

How many people are aching for a magsafe phone charger?

I can't imagine how you got used to the performance you have right now. Either you are not doing anything with your device or you would hugely benefit of upgrading at least every 3 years or so.

The 7200u supports 32GB or RAM. That chip is over 4 years old and nothing special. Not sure how long that's been supported, I didn't feel like looking further back.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95443/i...

Pretty incredible to blame another company for a decision that was made inside Apple. Especially for a chip that was designed from scratch in apple, and therefore has no Intel constraints.

and how are the macbook pro or mac mini entry level laptops?

That is not true, example CPU I had in my old laptop: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/pl/pl/ark/products/78939/i...

Supports 32GB RAM, released in 2014.

The reason some older laptops didn't have more RAM was twofold: 1. Either the BIOS wasn't written with such support 2. There were no RAM sticks big enough (no 16GB in a single SO-DIMM) so you could have 2x16 - but there are currently since a year or two, SO-DIMMs with 32GB RAM, so you could easily reach 64MB in a laptop.

Sound more like a Jetbrain ( IntelliJ company ) problem. Used to develop on PHPstorm ( another Jetbrain ) product ( same software in the background ) and the slow startup's, 2GB+ memory eating for relative small projects, crashes way too much, expensive as hell for what it does ( especially with the license change years ago ) ...

Eventually switched to Visual Studio Code and while people whine how Electron is memory inefficient, its like 1/6 the memory usage of PHPstorm, with only a few features missing.

Even on a 32GB PC system, i barely use 16GB ( and WSL2 is eating up a lot with a lot of docker images. And its not really docker, just Linux cache eating up memory ). Not a issue on a Mac that does not need a VM like layer.

Its about priorities sometimes. If people keep upgrading their memory, developers/companies simply push the responsibility to the clients and do not bother with spending time on optimizing.

If people start leaving software product on the way side for being just horrible inefficient messes, then maybe a bit of focus will come back to actually optimizing products! You will see Jetbrain change tune, when VSC etc keep eating its market share.

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=8192
    $ mkswap /swap
    $ swapon /swap
    $ echo "/swap swap swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

I use swap files all the time with things like raspberry pi's and such because I don't want to mess with the sd card partitions, but still from time to time it's good to have that swap fallback since the memory onboard is limited.

Swap files are super easy to set up, take up no "brainpower" and disk space is cheap these days.

If it works, is it impression or reality?

There's no way I'm buying a 16 GB computer now, 32 GB is a minimum to be future proof.

As for the GP cited use case, there's no plausible way in which the compilers involved in the V8 build process would start using less memory due to their memory management machinery getting magically transformed by the hardware from tracing GC to refcounting GC, even assuming LLVM had been using tracing GC in the first place.

(Also the tracing GC memory overhead claims originating in Apple's marketing copy are way hyperbolic, modern tracing GCs don't require double storage used in "mark and sweep" GCs)

But on a laptop, it matters a ton. Personally I prefer doing work from my couch rather than my desk; ergonomics and external monitors be damned.

Apple has already said that they are releasing a workstation-class M1X/M2 next year.

The point is that the M1 is already comparable to many workstations.

You can relax the power limits and try to clock it closer to the 5.3GHz turbo frequency. But how much power do you need? I can't find numbers specifically for the i9-10980HK, but it seems like the desktop i9-9900K needs over 160 watts [1] to hit a mere 4.7GHz across all cores, measured at the CPU package (ie. not including VRM losses). Overall system power would be in excess of 200 watts, perhaps 300 watts with a GPU. Good luck cooling that in a laptop unless it's 2 inches thick or has fans that sound like a jet engine.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...

Are you saying it's an unfair comparison? The Intel Macs are operating in the same environment as the M1 Macs. It doesn't matter if the Intel parts could be faster in theory, because you're still dealing with battery and size constraints. If you want unthrottled Intel CPU in a laptop, your only options are 6 pound, 2 inch thick gaming laptops with 30 minutes of battery life. Now comparing that (or worse, a desktop) to M1 is unfair.

Apple's thermal solutions could be better, but they are designed within Intel's power envelope specs. e.g. The i9-9880H in the current 16" MBP is only rated for 2.3Ghz with all cores active at its 45W TDP. The i9-9880H is a 2.3Ghz @ 45W part that can burst up to 4.8Ghz for short periods, not the other way around.

is it just a matter of making a thicker laptop?

There's nothing in M1 that indicates that Apple learned how to improve thermal management, but lots to indicate that they'd still rather make thinner/lighter devices that compromise on repair, expansion, or sustained high-end performance — the even deeper RAM integration, offering binned parts as the lower-end "budget" option instead of a designed solution, or offering Thunderbolt 3, fewer PCIe lanes, and a lower RAM cap as being enough for a MBP or Mini.

Stallman hasn’t been of much use for this, and his followers fervently cite his decades-old works each time I raise this point — but meanwhile, this is available today to any website accessed by any Apple Silicon MacBook, and it’s already deployed and in use in the (Linux) servers powering Azure Cloud, and it’ll probably reach the consumer Windows market in the next year.

Now what? After we get past “RMS told us this would happen”, after we blow off steam about “My ideals are being violated”, is there anything left to discuss and consider here?

I thought there was — for example: “Is it possible to reconcile the conflicting needs of safety and modifiability?” — but the prevalence of replies like the above over the past few weeks makes me think that I’m mistaken, and should simply let this go unnoticed until it’s too late and irrelevant what anyone believes.

That being said, I usually backup and "factory restore" my computers before servicing. Mostly because I don't want to hand out my password or hand over my personal data, but I expect them to test that its fixed and that's easier in a generic OS. I also think it'd be odd to hand over a Macbook Pro (or even a Microsoft Surface) with Linux installed and expect their random, low-level tech to asses things.

Until it doesn't. I can open my Thinkpad (W530) and replace parts in it that die. Can you say the same for your Macbook? Are you okay with a future where everyone follows Apple's example because it generates more profits, where right-to-repair is a thing of the past? I know that sounds alarmist, but it's definitely the trajectory I see.

Yes you need to spend a bit of work to find out what dependencies you need, but the configure scripts will tell you that when they fail.

> Homebrew is the perfect glue between the traditional Unix world and the somewhat unexpected Unix environment that macOS is providing these days (mostly a consequence of Xcode wanting to be a self-contained .app and /usr being read-only while still honoring the tradition of leaving /usr/local alone for you as a user)

On Mac packages have always naturally installed into /usr/local and not /usr.

There are code editing apps for iOS, but I don’t know what they're capable of these days. Some use cloud servers, but as soon as you know you want the option then the laptop is probably the way to go. Happy hunting!

out of curiosity, why did you return it?

[1] Even the family/model/stepping designation has an oddity: the 486 was family 4, the Pentium was family 5, and then everything from the Pentium II/III up to the latest Core series, as well as the Atoms, uses family 6; but the P4 was family 15.

A14/M1 will come, but the question is when...

Rosetta 2, from all reports, works well enough that I’d argue they’ve already succeeded in making the transition smooth enough to call it a success.

The main non-developer concern raised in this piece is extraneous dialog messages, which sadly we’ve pretty well all been trained to ignore. I agree they’re unfortunate, but they’re hardly a show-stopper.

The real risks Apple faces, as far as I can see:

* Will developers do the needful for universal apps? That seems to be well underway, even among the giants.

* Will a lack of x86-64 Windows emulation prove to be a deal-breaker for too many users? I’d say that’s impossible to know, but I’m optimistic. (And if Apple once again is setting a trend for the industry, Windows itself may fully make this transition someday.)

* Will Apple be able to keep up with AMD and Intel in the chip race? Obviously early signs are promising.

Big risks, but mostly ones Apple can control, or at least influence. What other dangers am I missing?

Adding: the dependence on TSMC is obviously a risk, but I imagine Apple has some notion of what they can do if they lose that option.

Most of the toolchains are OSS

I think it would probably work for web development as long as you keep everything inside WSL, but for other development tasks you're going to run into issues real quick.

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/873

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699

There's a Nobel Prize in there somewhere, get cracking

I don't care if the inevitable future of the Mac platform is more locked down. In fact I welcome it. Does it limit what I can do with my device? Of course. Do I lament some of the control I’ve already given up? Sure. But the trade off is a safer and smoother computing experience that allows me to focus more on what I want to achieve with what the platform does provide.

I spent some time on Linux, I got into hyper-customizing every minute detail, I swapped out third party RAM and even early adopted SSDs by mounting them in the optical drive bay. I built a PC tower from personally selected components. I triple booted Windows and Linux on my first Intel Mac with community built boot loaders well before Boot Camp was a thing.

I can’t imagine spending my time that way anymore. I learned a lot, but now I just wanna get stuff done. I like having some of the system out of reach. I like knowing that it’s readonly and I like the kind of hardware advances Apple’s vertical integration has enabled.

It’s okay if we value different things, and it’s okay if we make different compromises to experience them.

EDIT:

> isn't so difficult to understand, really

You may be confusing "understand" with "imagine"

Like what? ps5/xbox series x/ps4/xbox one are very sophisticated, comparable to a modern desktop PC, yet it's totally closed off. Consoles no longer resemble embedded devices like previous gens. Heck, even the original nes used the MOS 6502 chip, which was very popular in PCs in the early days.

Oh fuck no.

If you want a PC you can get a PC. Stop trying to force your mediocrity-for-all BS on those who don’t want PCs.

There are sectors of the industry where Windows is a hard requirement, ones where Macs are utterly dominant, and others where Linux is assumed and running a proprietary Apple OS gets you the side-eye.

Software development is a big tent.

M1 has been out for a short time, and Apple Stores are not accepting walk-in customers. People aren't seeing their friends much due to the pandemic, so it's unlikely that those who bought the new machines are broadly showing them off.

Lots of forum praise about M1 seems like it's coming from people who have no hands-on experience with the new devices. I have no reason to believe that Apple pays people to stir up hype on the web, but I definitely sense that the vast majority of people hyping M1 haven't purchased an M1 device. My sense is that they just read some blogs, ogle some benchmarks, and regurgitate what they see.

That's not exactly a diversity of opinion. I can tell you I've been voted down a couple of times just for suggesting that there's too much hype and not enough information.

This is just one of the things that you can do; I've occasionally patched system libraries, replaced resources, and so on depending on what I've wanted to do.