Now im no apple shill. So much so that I quietly laugh on the inside whenever I see someone flexing their overpriced, overdesigned, overmarketed apple bs. But..... From what we can tell from early reviewers, the new M1 based apple hardware blows every conventional pc out of the water, especially when it comes to power per watt. Even non-native apps seem to run about as fast through rosetta as they did on last gen macs, which is insane if you ever ran x86 code on ARM or vice versa. And they are only getting better with new hardware iterations and the arrival of more arm native software. At the same time they are locked down as fuck; i don't expect we'll see someone being able to run linux on them anytime soon.

In all honesty - and it brings me no joy to say this - i think apple just won the personal computing game. Especially if they start releasing some lower priced hardware next year. I don't see MS keeping up, and expect them to be limited to office environments. What's your 2 cents? will we see another ARM windows push? Will windows just give up? how will this change computing in the long run?

  • snuffles [he/him,any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    here is an article about benchmarking the new M1 devices. The tables show that the performance gap between apple and intel chips does shrink when comparing single to mulitcore benchmarks, but not by much. Certainly less than I would have expected from my experience using ARM based computers (yes I know cinnabench is a bad benchmark, but it's all we've got at this point).

    I was quick to dismiss their claims after their promo event, which was just so much hot air, but now i'm not so sure. Over time I'm almost certain that arm (or rather RISC) will become the default, mainly because of its power efficiency. The only limit was scalability. This is the first time we see workstation grade ARM PCs .

    Oh and from what i've heard photoshop runs as well on the new macs with rosetta as it did on last years intel based macs. And they are working on a virtualization layer for Linux, and specifically docker, so they are clearly trying to reach devs as well. I really think that apple has the potential to take over. assuming their launch doesn't flop