Is anyone else blown away by how fast these M1 MacBooks are? | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else blown away by how fast these M1 MacBooks are?

forums.macrumors.com

9 pointsaminozuur9 comments

Love the comments on the link.

when i compaire this to my 5 year old laptops it is faster

"I am completely blown away, I agree with you. I purposely got the lowest M1 Macbook Air 8GB 256GB, and it kicks the crap out of my 2015 15" Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM. Not even close..."

when i compaire this to my old 2013 machine the new one is faster?

"I upgraded from a 13" 2013 MacBook Pro - to the M1 MacBook Air 8GB 512GB - the difference is like night and day!"

Next, water is wet...

When I moved from a 2015 MBP to a 2019 model the difference in performance felt negligible. For various reasons it actually felt like a step backwards.

MacRumours has a broad range of readers, many are not technical, but these are customers reports which are valuable.

Personally I have a 2019 16” intel machine and a 2014 15” machine, and in day to day usage they feel very much the same in general usage, in spite of the 16” machine having twice the CPU cores, twice the RAM and solid state storage that’s over twice as fast. In fact comparing the two frankly, the GPU is the only thing that lets the 2014 machine down.

Now I personally know that Intel’s CPU performance broadly hasn’t increased very much per core in that time. Your average customer is not likely to know this - but that they can see a significant difference in basic usage is very interesting.

I can compare a relatively fresh (no full development environment yet, though with Xcode and VS Code in remote mode) M1 16GB MBP with heavily used (tons of Safari and Firefox tabs, VS Code with full local Node/TS dev setup) 15" 2019 32GB +4GB Radeon GPU MBP with Catalina. Did not run any benchmarks, so this is subjective and anecdotal.

Perceived performance in light use (browsing, content consumption, light Web development) feels roughly the same, though I may be holding the M1 machine to a slightly higher standard. Memory usage as reported by iPulse hovers around 60% on the former and 40% on the latter.

Battery life of the former beats the latter (from memory, that Intel machine was never really able to sustain more than 5-6 hours of use).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aJgiyR2emas

Somebody is.

M1, like everything, seems glacial to me.

Interestingly, if everything shows the same on your sensors, the highest likelihood event is that your sensors are broken. The second highest is that your sensors have low range.

That doesn't mean that the M1 is fast or slow. It only means that your opinion is useless as to determining processor speed. It has no range.

In ten years, nobody will be mooning over M1. To be "blown away" is to be very confused.

In the past fifteen years, CPU performance improvements have been minor and incremental. M1 is such an incremental improvement: M1 performs well, and Apple has reason to be pleased with the increment.

For performance per dollar, it is less compelling. For my needs, it absolutely falls flat. I will not be buying it.

Haters can downvote all they like, everything I wrote is exactly correct: Anybody who lived through the '90s will know the difference between M1 and Zen3 is nothing to write home about.

Meanwhile, as opinions go, I don't think HN benefits any from breathless commercial boosterism, and I, personally, would be ashamed to participate in it.

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