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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

Buy a used Intel Mac today and it will give you several more years of service while the ecosystem handles the ARM transition. You should never buy a first-gen Apple product, especially the first gen of such a radical change. I expect buyers of the first ARM-based Macs to end up like the buyers of the first Intel-based Macs who were saddled with Core Solo processors and 32-bit EFI.

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I expect buyers of the first ARM-based Macs to end up like the buyers of the first Intel-based Macs who were saddled with Core Solo processors and 32-bit EFI.

That’s not going to be the case this time around.

Apple has obviously been planning this transition for several years. Apple has been designing 64-bit ARM-based SoC since at least 2013—over 7 years.

Single-threaded speed surpassed Intel years ago; it's probably been a matter of getting the supporting silicon up to snuff.

I wouldn't be surprised if what we see this fall will be the 2nd or 3rd iteration of ARM-based Macs Apple has designed internally but the first to be revealed to the public.

I expect these first Apple Silicon Macs will be ridiculously fast, particularly on a performance per watt basis and even perhaps compared to similarly priced Intel hardware from brand name PC manufacturers.

Apple knows they only have one chance to make a first impression; I expect they will put a stake in the ground around that for these first consumer oriented Macs, with the promise of what's to come for Macs for pro users over the course of the two-year transition of the entire product line.

You could have said all the same things about the Intel transition

There are still going to be lessons learned from deploying millions of these devices that will be fixed in the second generation

You could have said all the same things about the Intel transition

Apple obviously wasn't designing Intel chips; they had no choice but to take whatever Intel had. Sure, they were better than the PowerPC processors from Motorola and IBM but it was Intel’s roadmap that sealed the deal.

This time, Apple doesn't have to settle for those trade-offs it had no choice but to swallow from Intel back in the day.

The two year old processor in the Apple Transition Kit already has very impressive performance; the first ARM-based Macs should even be more impressive with the latest and greatest chips: https://gizmodo.com/a-wild-apple-arm-benchmark-appears-18442....

I owned that machine - the original MacBook Pro from 2006, with a Core Duo - and it lasted five years and could have gone longer. I only replaced it after the aluminum bezel succumbed to mechanical fatigue. Of all the Macs I've ever owner, it was the most reliable and long-lived. The 32 bit ISA was never a problem in practice.

Perhaps, but Apple really hated it.

If you held on to that machine for a few more years it would have been dropped by OS X Yosemite, but then hilariously still supported by essentially making the machine a Hackintosh!

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2006-2007-mac-pro-1-1-2... https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2006-2007-mac-pro-1-1-2...

A similar situation played out when macOS Sierra dropped support for 2008–2009 models that can be re-enabled in a patch:

http://dosdude1.com/sierrapatch.html http://netkas.org/forum/index.php?topic=852.0

DosDude's patches are the bomb! I've upgraded my 2009 MBP all the way up to Mojave (I could have went to Catalina but I've upgraded my machine after it came out so decided to stay there)

The only real issues were that webcam no longer works (bummer) and that somewhere down the road Homebrew stopped supporting Penryn architecture with binary releases so I had to hack it to force it to compile stuff from source.

I thought the first Intel was the Mac Mini Core Solo. I ran that thing for years, and even more years after I should have upgraded.

I owned that exact machine and it was terribly slow, especially running Rosetta. Luckily the CPU was socketed and you could drop in a Core 2 Duo mobile CPU (up to a T7600) for a big upgrade!

http://www.o0o.it/mini/

https://lowendmac.com/2016/upgrade-options-for-2006-and-2007...

Don't forget your putty knifes! The Core 2 Duo upgrade was the only reason I was able to keep it alive as long as I did along with maxed out RAM. Never switched out to SSD. They were just too expensive.

First Macs introduced with Intel chips were actually the iMac and MacBook Pro, also the first Mac with a built-in camera and MagSafe.

The Mac Mini with Core Solo was introduced a month later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Intel_proces...

Either way, those first machines were supported way longer than expected. My 2006 MacBook Pro lasted me up until OS X Lion (10.7) and I still use it for BOINC.

But this chip will be the 14th iteration of the CPU and is already quite mature. The Apple GPU is already some years further after first release. The chip is also already 64bit. The main new thing is the Arm compilation of the OS and Rosetta layer and that can be updated with patch releases.

And their first time creating Thunderbolt. Just as an example.

They will have to migrate to USB 4 now, since Thunderbolt is Intel tech

… which they helped design and were the first significant user of, and which Intel donated to the USB-IF royalty-free to encourage adoption. Apple announced that they were going to support it and they’re not the kind of company which would do that without having control over their product direction.

That's a bummer though, I was actually hoping they would be the first consumer brand to go all-in on USB4 - similarly to how they were the first to ditch the floppy drive, and in numerous other occasions

I wish they brought Thunderbolt to iPad Pro already, would mean the Macs would have gen 2 silicon for it.

Apple will support thunderbolt https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/macs-with-apple-sili...

Thunderbolt was a joint effort between Apple and Intel, years before it came out, called "Light Peak" then. The first Intel demo was on a Mac, and Apple first announced the Thunderbolt commercial name.

It’s already 64 bit, but it’s still ARMv8. ARMv9 is just about to ship, and Apple will undoubtably want to transition to that as well.

There's still ARMv8.5 in the way ;)

I'm totally confident in their ability to pull off the ARM transition, but I think the fit-and-finish will be way better in the second- and third-gen products.

For another example, many people had first-gen Macbooks that would "moo" as the fan cycled on and off across a single-degree thermal boundary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEPzlIkBnGs

It was fixed in an update to the System Management Controller to change the fan behavior / thresholds: http://www.betalogue.com/2006/08/18/macbook-smc-firmware-upd...

edit: Almost forgot the build-quality issues with the first-gen Macbook Pros where the official service manual advised you to use one entire tube of thermal compound each for the CPU and GPU which obviously lead to overheating: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid... (images all missing)

I never thought I’d be spending the afternoon watching a YouTube video of a macbook “mooing” but here we are

I don't doubt apple, I doubt the devs of the software I rely on will put forth effort right away.

> You should never buy a first-gen Apple product

FUD. First Intel Macbook Pro, first iPhone, first iPad, first Apple Watch... these were all excellent devices.

Also, I believe you are misinformed about the types of processors available in the first Intel macs.

The first gen Apple Watch has not held up. My friend has one and it has nearly intolerable UI lag.

My first generation Apple Watch, affectionally known as a Series Zero, is still going strong.

It's not that fast but I just peered it with my iPhone 7 running the public beta of iOS 14 with no problems.

> Also, I believe you are misinformed about the types of processors available in the first Intel macs.

I owned one, so I believe you are :)

https://lowendmac.com/2014/core-solo-mac-mini-a-compromised-...

The first Intel Macs were the Macbook Pro and iMac, which had core duo. Looking on the internet, the first Intel mini came a month later, so I think it’s fair to call it one of the first Intel macs, but it had a core duo option as well (check lowendmac or mactracker), so I guess you chose the core solo, but can’t say you were “saddled” with it.

Anyway, that core solo mini also was a great little computer. I believe that’s the one I bought refurb, added RAM, a core 2 duo, and upgraded the wifi to N, and used it for years as a media head and server.

> FUD. First Intel Macbook Pro, first iPhone, first iPad, first Apple Watch... these were all excellent devices.

The 2nd gen were all extreme improvements though

> Also, I believe you are misinformed about the types of processors available in the first Intel macs.

as far as I remember the initial Intel Macs were a Mac Mini (Core Solo) and MacBooks (Core Duo).

32bit EFI was a thing and made life difficult with a Mac Pro. At some point the MacOS dropped support for the 32bit EFI, and had to have OS upgrades installed with patched installers.

The iPhone 3g was hot garbage.

The iPad 3 was pretty terrible very quickly as well - I think it was the slowest iPad they ever made. Mainly due to quickly cobbling a retina screen to hardware (GPU and RAM) that simply couldn’t drive that many pixels.

I never have or had a problem with the iPad 3’s performance. I did have a problem with how heavy it was compared to the previous generation

I really liked my iPhone 3g :/

I just wanted to be contrarian and get an Android phone instead, and I did for a while and the Android phones with keyboards were pretty great.

> The 2nd gen were all extreme improvements though

Welcome to the state-of-the- art in the mid 2000’s. That’s what Intel used to offer and why it was worth it for Apple to transition from PowerPC to Intel. But Intel hasn’t improved much in years. Yes, Apple will probably release significantly better processors in ARM macs in the upcoming years. But they likely would not be able to release Macs with significantly better Intel processors if they stick with Intel.

The first iPhone launched for 599 and was quickly slashed to 399 and lived a year before the app store launched. If you were an early adopter, you were a sucker, period.

The first iPad was a dead end, the performance was abysmal since it was basically a 3GS with a bigger screen, it didn't even have extra RAM to handle the larger graphical assets. Software stopped supporting it very quickly because it was impossible to get anything running under the RAM constraints. The iPad 2 which doubled the RAM had a much much longer lifespan

The first iPad has only 256MB of RAM that's half of iPhone 4 that has same SoC and smaller screen. Really awful decision.

> first iPhone...excellent devices.

The first gen iPhone was unusable for anything other than email. The pitch was that you get "the real web," and compared to WAP on feature phones, the was true, but honestly, the mobile web was years away from being ready enough to be useful. Internet functionality was basically unusable on 2.5g. Honestly, it wasn't even ready until 4g. I remember trying to use Google Maps on an iPhone a week after launch. It took minutes to load the map of where I was. This was in SF. The App Store hadn't launched yet.

I don't expect that but you're right to say go for a second hand intel if you're planning on using docker for a lot of stuff. Right now while docker can work with arm and most likely there will be an arm option when things launch, most docker images require intel hardware. I run docker on a pi4 and on an intel machine. On intel I can just install things like wordpress and mysql without a total train wreck. Finding docker images that work well for arm right now is painful. Maybe some of this will be fixed by the time the arm macs launch in which case raspberry pi4 will also benefit from a growth of docker support for arm.

iPad 1 comes to mind. Was dropped in about 13 months since the 2 was so much better. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. ;-)

My dad was using the one I gave him until it was destroyed in a fire last year. He was still fine with it except that the Amazon app didn’t work any more.

I still have my iPad 2, and it is "technically" a useful tablet. But it is worthless with Safari on modern (bloated) sites and doesn't show Netflix in HD, my two main usecases. No security updates either. I should recycle it but haven't been able to do it.

I tried to setup my iPad 3(?) a couple of weeks ago to control Apple Music on my stereo. It was just too slow and software was way out of rev. So, yeah, I tossed it back on my "recharging table" but it's pretty much useless.

Make it a Hacker News machine!

My trusty iPad 1 still serves in the kitchen as my recipe repository with Kindle, Evernote, and the occasional Web page.

The first retina iPad (iPad 3) was a great example of this. In hindsight, most people agree that it was rushed out without a powerful enough chipset to handle the higher res screen and so it aged quite badly. It was replaced by the iPad 4 only 6 months later.

I owned a Core Solo Mac Mini and an iPad 3, so maybe that explains my mindset here :p

That iPad is still kicking around for random uses like HLS video testing, luckily on 9.0.2 with the (to this day final) untethered Pangu jailbreak. Part of me wishes I never upgraded it past 8.4.1 though.

Seems to be the case with most of Apple's first-gen products since they're trying to see what customers end up doing with the device before iterating.

I bought a first-gen intel iMac and it lasted me a long time. I was quite happy with it.

I agree with your strategy, sometimes early adopters are also beta-testers.

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