I'm not sure I see most of the disagreement here. As Gruber says, Moorhead is mostly complaining about software incompatibilities. But that's part of the total package--especially with Apple which is about selling the total experience. Personally I'll probably switch sooner rather than later especially given that I don't run a lot of native apps on my laptop. But it seems pretty reasonable to critique a new architecture laptop for (unsurprisingly) having some growing pains related to, especially, third-party software. Because people use a laptop to run software, not in isolation.
I had a suspicion upon reading Moorhead's review that he was trying to use familiar enterprise Windows software on the M1 instead of trying to use native apps:
> So far, I have experienced application crashes in Microsoft Edge, Outlook, WinZip and Logitech Camera Control. I got installation errors with Adobe Reader XI, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, a Samsung SSD backup application, and Xbox 360 Controller for Mac.
What Mac user tries to use Edge and WinZip? A Samsung backup application? Xbox 360? Such a bizarre collection of software that snubs macOS's native browser.
I guess my question then is whether he uses macOS (note: it's OS 11 now!) as a daily driver or if he's just transplanting familiar software from his Windows habits in order to test drive the M1?
chrome has enterprise managed mode just the same, with even more capabilities (i.e. spying features to keep your post wording) than the microsoft ones.
MS enterprise mode can only control settings and extensions, google goes several steps further.
the chrome based edge is pretty decent... I'm still mostly using Chrome out of habbit, but there are a few things to like about the Chrome based Edge over Chrome.
To be fair, I'm getting absolutely enormous memory leaks in stock Safari on my new M1 MBP after a few hours of use. It doesn't seem to be reclaiming memory when tabs are closed.
There are growing pains, and they're not all in third-party apps. (It is hilarious to me, though, that WinZip a) exists for Mac and b) is used by anyone on a Mac.)
I might be mistaken but, IIRC many browsers will not free memory from closed tabs. They'll keep it and reuse it for new tabs instead of deallocating and reallocating too often as you play with tabs.
Every new tab incurs more RAM usage; it's not reusing. Usage keeps growing and growing until the system gets sluggish and it prompts me to kill Safari.
A browser isn't viable to me without ad blocking and 1Password.
Firefox has issues currently on M1, as well - uBlock Origin won't load, for example. Thankfully, that particular issue is fixable by disabling javascript.options.wasm and javascript.options.wasm_trustedprincipals in about:config as a temporary solution.
I fully expect these to be fixed, but it's clear it's gonna be a few weeks/months before everything runs right. If I were a non-technical user, I'd be returning it for an Intel Macbook.
In the meantime, disabling the 1Blocker Button extension in Safari > Preferences > Extensions and restarting Safari fixes it. It won't affect how our app blocks intrusive content in Safari since 1Blocker Button only provides quick actions to the main app.
As far as I can tell, the issue is present without any extensions. I'm not willing to browse unprotected for several hours to 100% confirm, but it still grows with every tab.
Yes, it grows, but slightly. Ever since 1Blocker updated their app to use the older logo rather than the new monochrome logo I am not seeing the disastrous memory growth I was seeing before. After ~5 days of use without restarting Safari it is still hovering at around 800 Mb used, instead of the 10 Gb+ it was using before.
Ultimately, my point is not "I need help fixing this" - I've gotten Firefox working fine with a few about:config tweaks. My point is "non-technical users are going to run into weird issues they can't necessarily fix right now".
Not running mac currently, but one of the things I hated was how the UX was for thinks like keka etc, vs 7-zip/winzip interfaces... they just didn't match how I was used to using the things, also having to extract an entire archive to pluck out the one or two files I was looking for is often a pain.
I don't disagree re: the GUIs for Mac compression apps.
Part of the reason for this IMHO is because your typical developer on a Mac has always used the command line tools for that sort of thing. So, Mac developers were never really motivated to build great GUI tools for certain things.
Compared to Windows, where the built in command prompt was lacking for so many years, and as a consequence 7zip/WinZIP/WinRAR gained really robust GUIs.
It's ironic that you mention that, as I often used to just defer to the command line as the UX for the gui apps was so bad. I've always been centered around client/server or web app development or the backend and it was never painful enough to make something for myself. (scratch the itch)
Wow, that’s a lot of memory use. Would you be willing to file a Feedback Assistant report with a sysdiagnose? Would like to see what’s up here. How many tabs is this?
To be a "Mac user" you have to give up the software you prefer, and use the software Mac prefers you to use. And you don't get to be unhappy if the software you prefer doesn't run OK? I am so happy to not be a Mac user, even if I'm sad I won't be trying out the great M1 CPU any time soon.
How is this different than any other OS? My preferred software is Mac or *nix based, so by your logic:
To be a "Windows user" you have to give up the software you prefer, and use the software Windows prefers you to use. And you don't get to be unhappy if the software you prefer doesn't run OK?
I can't tell but I think you're making my point. As a Windows user, I can absolutely be unhappy if software I prefer does not run. If someone comes around and says "but that software was originally for Mac... you aren't allowed to expect it to run well on Windows! A real Windows user wouldn't complain about that software."
And if the software I prefer runs better on macOS, I have a good reason to switch away from Windows. Just as if software you prefer runs better on Windows, you can complain about macOS (or in this case, incompatibility due to the ISA switch.)
My issue was with the comment using "mac user" as an excuse for software that isn't what the "true" mac user considers essential not working well.
MacOS is extremely good at supporting software originally developed on the OSes. After all you can get all the flagship MS Office apps on the Mac in very good iterations, plenty of Windows first vendors do support the Mac with version of their software, there are virtualisation and emulation solutions, and a lot of Linux software compiles and runs fine on the Mac as it's also a flavour of Unix.
In contrast, if you take the vast majority of MacOS first apps, there is no way you are ever running the vast majority of that stuff on other platforms. A wide variety of games even run on MacOS either natively or through compatibility layers like Porting Kit. In this respect out of Windows, Linux/Unix and MacOS, I think it's clear that MacOS wins hands down. It's not even close.
So given that this is pretty obvious, and I have a hard time believing you aren't perfectly well aware of this, why on earth are you trying to make this argument. Is running other platform's software really a primary criterion for you? In which case, the Mac should be right up your street.
Exactly. So you either go back to using macOS, or you complain that Windows doesn't run the software you like. It's OK to do that for any OS you run. It's a valid reason to not like an OS, or in this case, an OS that is going through a transition to a new ISA. Until it runs the software you prefer, it isn't ideal.
Sure, but it doesn't necessarily make it an objectively poorer product just because it's hard to swim against the current on that platform. Every platform necessarily has some expectation of doing things a certain way, and when things are done that way the experience will be better/easier.
You seemed to be implying that this was some unique problem with OSX and that's what is holding you back from trying M1. But really, it sounds like what is holding you back is just the normal barriers of changing platforms.
Personally as a Windows user I am hoping that Windows for ARM gets supported on M1 soon, but I don't think it's so unreasonable we're not there yet, and I am not going to discount the whole platform just because of it.
I do not hope to imply that this is a unique problem on OSX. I just disagree a bit that you have to conform to a standardized way to use a platform. Perhaps you do, with OSX, and it is a unique problem there? Obviously due to market structure, Microsoft gears Windows to "everyone" without being the "best" for many people, although it tends to be the best for PC gaming.
What is holding me back from trying the M1, personally, is cost. I just paid $950 for a Ryzen 7 4800H with 16GB and GTX 1660 Ti. It can't hold a candle to an M1 Macbook in battery life, but I know I can run my programs and play my games and not think twice about it. My failsafe is an electrical outlet. I'm hoping I can end up trying an M1 (or successor) through an employer though! I spent the past year using a ~2014 Macbook Pro through work, and for work things, it was better than my Windows machines for working on projects where everyone else used bash on a Mac. As WSL improved, I was able to be equally productive on my Windows machines and tend to use them and not bother with the Macbook Pro.
That's all a lot of extra anecdote you didn't need, but to be sure, I'm not trying to single out OSX - the OP singled it out by saying, essentially, "you're using it wrong!"
Apple is pushing the "play any iOS game on the new Macs" hard. And a lot of them are supporting controllers natively on iPad and iPhone so obvious someone wants to try that out too.
Instead of a browser, I guess I installed demons. I wish they'd get this shit right. MS Teams always has this notification window hiding in the background so that whenever one alt-tabs to Teams the window doesn't actually have focus and your typing goes to /dev/null. And now their browser does this "fit-and-finish" crap that few muggles will parse.
Ditto Microsoft Edge, installed, ran a few websites - no issues, aside from a bit slow speed (although it may be just a crappy browser, never tried it on an Intel).
Perhaps with some heavier usage there are issues, but so far so good.
That does sound a little sketchy... though I can see wanting to use the 360 controller, would like to see a review on how well most of the Steam supported games run for example. I'd been considering doing an ITX build for the living room, mostly for emulation/games... the new mac mini is definitely in the consideration, and seems to sit right between a lot of the nuc/sff options and mini-itx options and punch above it's weight against the latter.
Enterprise users often don't have a choice. Microsoft is pushing very hard to get Edge set as mandated browser at enterprises everwhere. In work we're also moving away from Chrome for this reason.
I read Gruber frequently even though he annoys me (he's sort of like John Dvorak that way), and this piece is kind of emblematic of why he does. To be clear, the ARM Macs are way more exciting than I expected, and I'll probably buy one at some point. I also do not think Moorhead's Fortune article was perfect, but Gruber's righteous indignation is grating.
These statements are pitted against each other, even though they are both very much true:
> emulating or translating apps ... is necessarily going to be ... somewhat incompatible at best ... But Apple’s Rosetta 2 ... is a technical marvel.
He's upset about this quote from Moorhead's review:
> there were some very positive things about the new laptop. The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect — it has many warts
Moorhead perhaps punctuated this poorly, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the warts refer to "the new laptop" in general, not just "the new M1 processor" in particular. Yes, his problems are generally software related (although he cited fan noise as a complaint), but that's a huge part of the product. Lots of people would love to use an M1 Mac without macOS, including one particular Finn.
Gruber can say, "There is no 'Well, here’s the downside' with regard to the state of Apple Silicon," but that remains to be seen. How much of the M1's advantage is due to a trillion dollar company buying up every last bit of TSMC's 5nm production capacity? Can they scale the unified memory architecture much beyond 16 GB? If they can, great; they've truly lapped the field.
> There is no balance, if by balance, you’re looking for a story that says any PC hardware, ARM or x86, is competitive in any way with the M1 Macs for low-energy computing.
This review wasn't about "low-energy computing." It was about using a new Mac as a replacement for an old Mac. This is a real, shipping product, not a beta. You can snicker at Moorhead's Microsoft-centric workflow and choice of apps., but that's his perspective.
>How much of the M1's advantage is due to a trillion dollar company buying up every last bit of TSMC's 5nm production capacity?
Yes, it's very hard to separate process from architectural (and implementation) design. And, as an industry, we're probably sticking our fingers in our ears more than we should about what happens when process shrinks really truly stop happening. And they will. There are still a variety of options but there's very little evidence they have anything like the legs of CMOS process scaling even if we do dump a big part of the problem on developers who don't get to develop for a largely unified architecture any longer or lean as heavily on high-level abstractions.
He may have wanted to say “the hardware is great, but not all software is ready for it, and it is consumer hardware, so it may not have enough ports for you”, but if so, it’s badly written.
Certainly, that second paragraph stating the M1 has many warts and is only fine for users who have a lot of money, to me, conveys a different message.
The disagreement is because most M1 reviews/comments were a bit of fan fiction - ranging from custom instructions for JavaScript, to "order of magnitude" perf per watt gains. Just as it doesn't make sense comparing the performance of the fanless M1 with a desktop CPU, it doesn't make sense comparing the perf-per-watt either; they are just optimized for different parameters. From what I've seen with the more objective benchmarks (not just geekbench), the Ryzens don't seem to be doing worse if you account for 7nm vs 5nm.
Complaining about incompatibilities in software used by less than 5% of Mac users and ignoring the strong compatibility of software used by 95% of Mac users seems misleading.
Equally, talking only about the stuff that works great and completely ignoring the incompatibilities that do exist is also misleading.
Every other review out there covered the strong compatibility and how amazing the M1 is. I for one am glad that there exist a least a couple of reviews that focus on everything that doesn't work. Let's be honest, no one these days makes a purchasing decision based off of just reading the first review they find.
I agree but these reviewers should weight and categorize the problems they find. For example reviews have been pretty consistent that
1) Graphic Design software:
Works well out of box. Key Adobe apps not yet native and have some minor issues under Rosetta, but still work, are still fast and should be much faster when native.
2) Video Production:
Unbelievably fast, on par with high end iMacs and Mac Pros and should get faster as all tools go native.
3) Software Developers:
Super fast builds and tools. Homebrew not native yet but can still use with Rosetta version of terminal. If you need Docker it’s months away.
4) niche Users of esoteric apps ported from windows: this is the group Patrick reported in. Yea, some of these apps are months away from being usable but all have perfectly cromulent native replacements.
Docker not working sure was a deal breaker for me. That's the sort of thing I would expect to work out of the box. A huge number of developers use that daily and they seem like a pretty big chunk of Apple's target market for macbook pros.
