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By all accounts Rosetta 2 is doing a great job, don’t forget the M1 is the low end 1st attempt at this and is a direct replacement for low end models.

Higher end intel gear is still available for the MacBook Pro & Mac mini.

Power usage in the Mac mini is interesting, 4.2w idle, ~30w peak.

I’m still awaiting detail on how the 8GB unit performs and if that ssd is actually quick enough to mask lack of ram.

I guess that the M1 based systems are not yet ready for full blown software development outside of what Apple provides. Having no Virtual Machine support makes most web app testing pretty hard; sometimes you really want to run software in your own boxes instead of deploying to the cloud and then trying to debug/test it.

I am actually hoping that Virtual Box is ported. And they provide a more powerful system for the 16” system.

Maybe a 16 core, 32 gb system. Who knows.

Eh?

VM's on Linux boxes are still a thing, you know.

Yet. Both VMware and Parallels are expected to release versions soon.

Don't forget that Apple reserves something like 20% of RAM for compressed memory. This works well when apps have large amounts of idle memory, but it causes performance draining page faults for data crunching apps where all the memory is active. Figure there's less than 10 GB of full speed RAM left after the OS, hardware, and swap cache take their cut from a 16 GB system. An 8 GB model might have under 4GB of the good stuff.

>Don't forget that Apple reserves something like 20% of RAM for compressed memory.

That's how macOS worked on Intel - does it work that way on these M1 chips?

> Power usage in the Mac mini is interesting, 4.2w idle, ~30w peak.

Just to be clear, as Anandtech tested it, that's the power consumption of the entire Mac Mini (including its internal power transformer) since they weren't allowed to take the unit apart. They estimated that the peak of the M1 CPU GPU SoC is under 25W, after the power supply losses are taken into account.b

My initial thought was a bit of a grumble. It won’t run Linux, I thought (I can accept that it won’t run Windows - and I don’t really care. Windows isn’t part of my general use-case, and I’m prepared to bet that it isn’t part of the use-case for 99.5% of Mac users). But then, I thought, most users won’t care if it can’t run Linux either - and, to be honest, the only OSs installed on any of my Macs are OSs from Cupertino. I have other computers dedicated to Linux or Windows.

This isn’t exactly a new situation, or thinking different either. This is a return to the way things were - albeit with one major improvement. In the 70s, 80s and even to a certain extent the 90s, a significant percentage of the computers that you could buy were like this. If it had an Acorn, Apple, Commodore or Atari badge (i.e. the big players that we all remember and love) then it would run the OS that its manufacturer wrote for it, and no other. Well, no other unless you were prepared for significant jiggery-pokery.

The major improvement, of course, is that in those days the CPU was still an off-the-shelf part, and the OS and CPU were not designed one for the other. Silicon is just as much designed for macOS as macOS is for Silicon - that phenomenal speed is not magic. It’s synergy. Perhaps that synergy, more than anything else, is the significant breakthrough here.

I don’t think that there’s any need to worry about software support. Even if most of the software doesn’t get recompiled, and remains running in Rosetta, these new Macs are still up there with the best that Intel has to offer for general computing purposes. But that’s not going to happen - there’ll be plenty of support, and quickly. Apple has made the transition about as easy as it could possibly be. And, of course, if you don’t need mind-boggling speed but you do care about being able to run whatever OS you choose then this may not be the computer for you - but, luckily, AMD are making some tasty and quick CPUs that will be right up your street.

Would I buy one though? No. This Intel-slayingly quick processor is Apple’s ‘budget’ model. This is the low end - and a first attempt at that (historically, of course, first stabs are always compromised - Apple's, perhaps, more than anyones). I want to see what they can do with the high end. When the high end models launch, I’ll open my wallet.

If it had an Acorn, Apple, Commodore or Atari badge (i.e. the big players that we all remember and love) then it would run the OS that its manufacturer wrote for it, and no other. Well, no other unless you were prepared for significant jiggery-pokery.

IIRC all of them let you run e.g. some Unix variant and some had PC compatibility. The 8-bits before them let you run CP/M if they had a Z80 CPU. None of them made you jump through as many hoops as Apple does today.

Things like the Amiga had various custom chips as well as the 68000. The OS was compiled for the specific version.

You would have to go through a lot of jiggery pokery to get another OS running on it as smoothly as the one it shipped with.

Amiga UNIX (Amix) was a thing, although Commodore priced it too high. Sun wanted to resell the A3000UX and Commodore screwed up there too.

Linux and NetBSD have Amiga ports, NetBSD for the Amiga came out in the mid 90s.

Many UNIX programs could be ported to AmigaOS as just one more #ifdef in the list of #ifdefs.

Applications running under Rosetta 2 run faster than they do natively on the Macs these new M1 models replace. That likely isn't a coincidence, but the result of a deliberate decision at Apple to only release the M1 Macs at this time. It makes their communication, their marketing if you will, that bit easier for them. Competency.

Hats off to whoever planned that, as well as hats off to the silicon design teams (who apparently worked closely with the Rosetta 2 team to make this possible.)

I hope it's improved since 2013 when Linus said "Geek Bench has apparently replaced dhrystone as your favourite useless benchmark" and other less complimentary stuff. Linus Torvalds, that is.

There's a lot of distrust of Geekbench, as you note. That's why Andrei over at Anandtech appears to have been throwing everything he can think of at it since taking delivery of an M1 Mac Mini. There should be enough there to give people an idea of how well it will perform for their real life work loads.

Quite a few typos in his report suggest that he's either not slept yet or has just wanted to post the report ASAP:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/2

...since any criticism of Apple can result in excommunication I feel unable to trust web sites that can get access to Apples stuff.

Private citizens have been taking delivery of M1 Macs for nearly two days now - not just websites who may or may not have received review units. They're in agreement.

You're inferring that Anandtech are merely shills. There's nothing to stop you reviewing their methodology and reading up on their history before posting here.

I agree scepticism is generally good thing, but it doesn't stop one from looking at further evidence. That's the definition of cynicism.

These new macs appear to be phenomenal user surveillance pieces of equipment, they might not be fully there yet they do have the potential to do amazing things in the area of user surveillance.

What, why? Because they're fitted with better than average microphones? Because they don't crash every half hour like my Windows 98 PC did?

My sharp paring knife has the potential to do amazing things in the area of causing blood to come out of my fingers. But that's irrelevant because it's very good at slicing tomatoes.

Apple has its users best interests in mind, keeping the users protected and away from undesirable influence is top of mind at apple, by keeping them permanently under surveillance apple is able to ensure that they do not stray from the pack and get lost.

...I feel "the machines appear to perform well"

is possibly underselling the achievement of double the battery life combined; "outstanding", "blows away every ultraportable, with no fan noise to get in the way." "the future of CPU design" & "over-performer."

I absolutely loved the original Archimedes. BBC Basic on demand, easy access to disassemblers, a clean, colourful and very responsive UI with a large proportion of it sat in ROM, and a good software selection too. In it's day, the only thing it really missed out on was having the dedicated graphics-mangling silicon that made the Amiga. Acorn got an awful lot right in the architecture of the machine. Acorn got an awful lot wrong by targetting it purely at schools; as they were excellent productivity machines. And low and behold that architecture lives on giving benefits over the competition.

Not many have commented on another feature of these machines. The price-point. The laptops are probably about right. MacMini slightly over-egged.

Apple have spotted an opportunity to create decently (if not high) performing lightweight machines using an ecosystem that they've already developed. I won't be picking up the "mark 1" version; these eyes prefer a larger monitor, and, you know what happens to early adopters. Whether the ARM scales to higher performance levels is another matter. More parallel units obviously possible; but what about out-and-out raw performance that the Mac Pro brigade will demand? PCI-Express interfaces for big GPU's etc. I'm hopeful they can pull this off. Server-grade ARM hardware with some aspects of these features have been around a fair while so certainly possible.

> The price-point. The laptops are probably about right. MacMini slightly over-egged.

Yeah, that was my initial thought when I saw the Mac Mini price - if Apple sold it cheaper they could shift loads, and after all, there's not much to it beyond the M1, no screen or keyboard. But then I remembered that TSMC's production capacity for 5nm chips isn't unlimited.

> Whether the ARM scales to higher performance levels is another matter.

Shouldn't be a problem. Single core performance beats almost everything. Machines built for better thermal performance should allow more cores to run fast, though Anandtech note that a single core can saturate the memory so using more than one core can actually degrade performance.

The GPU question is interesting because the M1's GPU beats all integrated graphics and many lower end discrete graphics at far lower power consumption. Apple's roadmap doesn't show any AMD GPU's on ARM Macs. This suggests that Apple are confident of building a discrete GPU of their own.

Adobe has released a feature-complete Photoshop ARM beta for macOS, whilst stating that they don't officially support Rosetta 2 (although it seems to work). Across various Mac forums this has only reawakened user criticism of Adobe, for their slowness in adapting, their licensing terms and longstanding UI niggles, with much discussion of viable alternatives such as Affinity.

It's not as if Adobe haven't been slowly porting / rewriting Photoshop to ARM (iPad) for a few years now, or that Apple won't let them have development kits, or that they don't have the resources.

I'm a Windows user, and as such it reminds me of how slow first Microsoft was to support high resolution monitors properly, and then after they fixed it, how slow (years!) Adobe were to have Photoshop work at high resolutions without the tool palettes being unusably tiny. Grrr.

Okay, maybe I'm anti Adobe today because for the love of dog I don't understand why in Illustrator it's impossible to have the scroll wheel tied to zoom in / out as it is in Photoshop and in every CAD package from the last two decades.

El Reg» El Reg isn't allowed within 100ft of Apple review hardware for reasons you can guess...

You need to take a leaf out of Apple's book: Rosetta.

El Reg publishes articles that conform to Apple Marketing (aka propaganda) and you provide a Rosetta-Stone-like icon (e.g. the one from Civilization I) that translates into Regspeak. That way El Reg slowly becomes the most favoured altar boy while we get the gossip from the presbytery.

"Apple Arm M1 Macs ship... tho don't expect all open-source apps to work"

Why would open-source "apps" not be ready for the new architecture. If we are provided with a C and C++ compiler, it is as simple as just building the source as usual. Since the API hasn't changed, there should be very few platform specific parts needing changing.

Especially since many of the x86 specific code has already been eliminated whilst "fun porting" to the Raspberry Pi. Open-source is really good here.

The main reason why iOS and Android are "hard" is because of the terrible toolchains and focus on vendor specific languages. And even then they aren't hard, people just lack interest for such short-lived platforms.