I’m highly upset and disappointed that you don’t support my Apple fetish.
I think the reason I love Macs so much is that the two I’ve owned have lasted 8+ years and they’ve done the work I could have expected. But I never have tried to push my machines to the extreme if it’s not baking a render or animation in 3D graphics on my desktop. And now you can rent render farms, which was my idea 10 years ago
That's fair, I've always been baffled by the people who buy such expensive hardware for doing minor tasks but to each their own. You might run into more problems than you think with regular usage - while Apple will doubtlessly support ARM in their lineup of applications companies like Adobe or Microsoft won't be as quick to the punch (though with MS I'm pretty sure they have an ARM version of Office for their shit ARM Surfaces, don't know the work involved to get that to run on an Apple CPU). A good way to determine if this is a good purchase for you is to figure out which software you've used over the last year or so, and to see if there's already an ARM equivalent. If there isn't, try picturing yourself taking a 30-40% performance hit while using that software. Is it still tolerable?
what are your more general criticisms of this lineup? thinking of buying one myself
Check out the last few comments I made above to Moh's post. Generally speaking I'm on the fence with this change, but mostly because it's Apple. I liked that Intel was holding them accountable. They were sort of "forced" to have relatively open hardware that you could run Linux or Windows on pretty easily. I'm sure some basement genius is going to come up with a solution to the Linux problem if there isn't one already, but Windows will not run on Apple ARM hardware ever.
Apple's core philosophy whenever they design or create a new product is to make sure that they have "end-to-end control". They want to control the hardware, the software, how you use the machine, and what you're able to do with it. I'm afraid that this move to ARM appears to be a shiny new "revolutionary" scale move, but is really Apple's biggest attempt yet at trying to control the entire spectrum of the user experience. They want to reduce flexibility - they do not want to give you more of it.
Having said that ARM is a great architecture that creates a lot more room for some really cool stuff to happen. Once this is mainstream, Apple machines will probably be extremely performant, especially in the laptop space. Not to mention running mobile apps on ALL portable devices regardless of form factor is something Google introduced and has proved to be very useful (running Android apps on Chromebooks). Using ARM exclusively will always have its issues though. It's a completely different architecture from x86 or x64, which we're all used to. That means that to run a modern application on ARM (that isn't natively compatible), you need to emulate it. This is very difficult to do especially at the 64-bit band of things. Apple has been able to achieve roughly 2/3 of native performance, which is great for emulation, but as I mentioned to Moh, you're paying a premium for a third less performance.
If I were in your shoes and were really curious about this device and had the money to burn, then go for it. If you're reluctant and you feel you could put the money toward other things, do that instead. It's a first gen product. Wait until it's refined. The emulation will only get better in time, so by gen 3 or so, I wouldn't be surprised if they've achieved 80-90% performance (it'll never be 100% though, keep that in mind).
