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Comment by mwint | Hacker News Reader

Go buy an M1 machine, use it for a week, and return it. Except you won't return it, because you'll recognize it's amazing beyond its benchmarks.

And single core performance can't be discounted - turns out, it's often a huge component of user experience. Lots of software out there that hasn't been, or can't be, multithreaded.

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Literally the only thing an M1 MacBook would be useful for me is web browsing. The hardware is totally wasted by the OS. I have an Intel MacBook Pro 16, but the M1 MacBooks have an impressive GPU that's only useful for extremely niche applications. If Apple ever added Vulkan support which would quickly allow proton/wine/dxvk to work, it would be something to consider.

It only runs macos, so I'll definitely return mine.

And Linux and OpenBSD

There are so many issues with the current implimentation that I think saying "it runs" is a bit of a stretch. I'll give it to you when you have a hardware-accelerated desktop, until then "it runs" Linux as much as a toaster SOC can "run" Linux.

That is being worked on too:

https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-2.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-3.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-4.html

I look forward to when it's ready, then.

Sounds like you haven’t used Asahi at all. The software rendering is actually very functional and perfectly usable for programming. It’s just multimedia/gaming where it fails.

Why would you ever spend $6000 on $300 of parts to run an operating system that could be run on a regular computer?

Where’d the $6k number come from? You can get an M1 machine starting in the $700 range.

> Go buy an M1 machine, use it for a week, and return it. Except you won't return it, because you'll recognize it's amazing beyond its benchmarks.

I bought it and it's... fine? Maybe you need to buy a good non-Apple computer to see that they can also be "amazing beyond benchmarks".

Cool with the fanyboism.

I’d actually love to do this, what should I buy?

> Go buy an M1 machine, use it for a week, and return it.

I did.

> And single core performance can't be discounted

It doesn't support the speed claims made about the machine, and as a result, it can.

> turns out, it's often a huge component of user experience.

Yes, and as soon as it's pointed out that the M1 doesn't win on single core performance either, the goalpost moves to performance per watt.

And when it's pointed out that the M1 doesn't win there either, it moves to battery life.

And then ...

The point is, M1 only looks good before hard numbers are revealed.

You know, like when they said it was faster than a 3090, and it's actually slower than a 2060?

For me it seems to be the latency rather than raw speed. It's like how a sprinter can get off the line far quicker than a muscle car even if it's not going to win over a mile. For 90% of what I do, the snappiness of things on the M1 beats raw high end performance. It feels like when I first got an SSD.

Actually I would, because there are much cheaper alternatives to deal with 3D graphics programming.

Macs are fine as long as I get them from the job, I am not paying for them privately.

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