We still don't know how good is the FTL in the Apple controller; all the devices are still too new and haven't been dragged through the coal as all the other controllers. It is still in the "easy job" part of it's lifecycle, with brand new flash cells.
We are getting too deep into irrelevant things. We don't know how much of Anobit IP was used in M1 macs; they may own it, but they might not use it all. They purchase their NAND and it may be not compatible with the current gen, just like when it was not compatible with Samsung's V-NAND/3D TLC.
In practice, the I/O performance of M1-based Macs is comparable to random PCIE 3.0 NVMe drive. (I'm typing this comment on M1 MBP, I'm well aware how it performs).
I think these performance metrics are somewhat limited in their usefulness. A Ryzen workstation might not have the same single-core performance or energy efficiency—however, a ryzen workstation can have gobs of memory for massive data-intensive workloads for the same cost as a baseline M1 device.
In addition: let’s talk upgradability or repairability. Oh wait, Apple doesn’t play that game. You’ll get more mileage on the workstation hands-down.
The only win for those those chips I think is battery efficient for a laptop. But, then why not just VNC into a beastmode machine on a netbook and compile remotely? After all, that’s what CI/CD pipeline is for.
granted they charge exorbitant prices for their hardware, but I can’t believe how my 2010 MacBook Pro is still functioning perfectly fine.. except for them making it unsupported. I can’t say that about any other pc/laptop I have had. Not even desktops
I don't know, I feel other laptops at the same price point as Apple Macbooks do this too, sometimes even better. I bought a HP 8530w in 2009 or so and it still works. Replacing the DVD drive for a SSD required just a common Philips screwdriver and battery replacements are sold by HP themselves or many others.
Exactly. Too many people compare a $400 cheap Windows laptop to a $1200 Macbook. Compare like for like, and the thing is likely to last until it's absolutely obsolete. And, while I don't really support this, some might find it an advantage to replace the computer three times for the same price. But people should be comparing to a well built, upgradable laptop (especially those that support not just RAM and disk but also display upgrades and adequate ports), running an operating system that has no arbitrary end of life.
You don't want to know what the Dells are capable of doing. My XPS 15 2020 literally got on fire somewhere on the motherboard - not even a battery thing. Then I decided to go Apple only.
I’d love to see an actual serious comparison between an M1 Mac and a $400 laptop. That would be hilarious. Since there are so many of them, can you direct me to one, or even a few?
The point is that with mid-2010s apple laptops, >5 year lifespans are the norm. With the majority of other, even comparably priced laptops, that is the exception.
There are other laptops that are similar or superior build quality to those from Apple (N.B. - older MacBooks, not the newer ones) but those are also easy to spot. They’ll usually be ThinkPads or some XPS models from dell.
> With the majority of other, even comparably priced laptops, that is the exception.
Consumer grade PC hardware has terrible build quality, and regardless of the price of your unit, the consumer build spec is just inferior to the business/professional lines. Asus, MSI, Sony, Acer, etc laptops all have consumer grade build quality and they just aren't designed to last a decade.
> They’ll usually be ThinkPads or some XPS models from dell.
Precision/XPS and Thinkpad models (with the exception of the L and E series) are almost always in the same price range as a MacBook. Any business-class machine (Thinkpad, Precision/Latitude, Elitebook) should easily last >5 years. These are vendors which will sell you 3-5 year on-site warranties for their laptops.
This is why you can find so many off-lease corporate laptops on eBay from any model year in the last 10 years or so. The hardware doesn't break, it just becomes obsolete.
For Dell, at least the business class desktops, they're trash, and are barely useable after 2-3 years and usually have some kind of problem long before that. I'm pretty sure Dell expects most businesses to buy new ones in that time frame.
I really want to like Dell's XPS line. I really do. But their technical support is atrocious. My XPS trackpad stopped working months after purchase, and getting them to repair it was an utter nightmare. Their tech support seemingly hasn't improved at all in the past decade (which is when I last vowed to never buy a Dell again due to their horrible tech support). They may fool me twice, but never again.
(I do hear that their business support is pretty good though)
> and getting them to repair it was an utter nightmare
~8 years ago; within 48h of the laptop breaking - had a Dell repair tech sitting at my kitchen table replacing mainboard on an XPS laptop. Has turnaround when you have the proper support contracts gotten that much worse?
(admittedly, we did pay for the top support tier for a personal device as it was expensed for work. I wouldn't do anything else from any manufacturer though unless I had on-site tech support/replacement.)
Oh that's baloney. There's nothing special about Apple laptops besides the metal case. Arguably they have worse cooling than most PC laptops. My 2018 MBP runs like it's trying cook an egg and has since day one. My Brother's 2012 MBP suffered complete logic board failure after 4 or 5 years.
If it wasn't for the replacement keyboard warranty offered by Apple a good chunk of butterfly keyboard Macs would be useless junk due to the fact it's so hard to replace them. Frayed MagSafe adapters were a regular occurrence. And swollen batteries pushing up the top case not that rare either.
I think maybe people keep MacBooks longer, but it probably has more to do with the fact they spent so much on them that they feel it's worthwhile to repair/pay for AppleCare than them actually being magically more durable.
I was using my Dad's old ThinkPad 385XD from 1998 in 2009. Battery was unsurprisingly dead but every other piece was stock and worked although at some point I swapped the worn down trackpoint nub with one of the included spares we still had.
My "writing desk" PC is a Thinkpad X201 tablet from 2010, with the same SSD upgrade I put in my own 2010 Macbook Pro (a dedicated Logic Pro machine these days). There have always been manufacturers for whom that's the case on the PC side of things--you just kinda had to pay for it up front.
My two main PCs are a Phenom II-based desktop and a Thinkpad X220i (with the lowly Core i3, even!). Both are perfectly functional and usable today, with a few minor upgrades here and there, the usual SSDs, more RAM and a Radeon RX560 for the desktop.
The Thinkpad is obviously no powerhouse, but still works great for general desktop use, ie. browsing, email, document editing, music, video (1080p h264 is no problem). The desktop plays GTA V at around 40-50 FPS at 1080p with maximum settings. And this isn't some premium build, it's a pretty standard Asrock motherboard with Kingston ValueRAM and a Samsung SSD.
Decade-old hardware is still perfectly viable today.
I just had storage fail on my first gen touchbar macbook. It's a PITA, the storage is soldered onto a board. They replace the board, the can't recover the data (didn't expect them to). I'd pay the extra mm or two it would require them to just use a standard like m2. SSD storage just fails after awhile, especially if you do lots of things that thrash the disk.
Using 2011 sandybridge motherboard with a xeon-1230 i bought in 2012. I Had to replace 2 HDD + started using ssd for OS partition. It's working great, need to replace my nvidia GPU that is EOL but still working great.
I have an old gaming ASUS laptop from 2010. Still works like a charm after hard drive was switched to SSD. I have an even older Asus Netbook (15 years old eee PC I think) that still works. Netbook is too slow for modern software and I do not really use it but it works.
This is exactly how I've worked for a number of years now, for my home/personal/freelance work. Usually using a Chromebook netbook ssh'ing into my high spec home server.
I'd do the same for work, but work usually requires using a work laptop (MacBook).
I've worked that way for 10 years. My current desktop is a 5 year old Intel i3 NUC with a paltry 8G of memory. Granted, it uses all that memory (and a bit more) for a browser and slack, and the fan spins up any time a video plays. But usually it's silent, can drive a 4k monitor, and most of the time I'm just using mosh and a terminal, which require nearly nothing.
OTOH, the machine that I'm connecting to has 32c/64t, half a terabyte of RAM and dozens of TB of storage.
A lot of what I do is compiling, so for that I'd still be fine with fewer cores and a lot less RAM. But I also do backtesting of trading strategies, and for that I can use all the cores I can get. The memory is needed to cache the massive amount of data that is being read from a pair of 2T NVME SSDs. Without adequate caching, I/O can easily become the bottleneck, even though the SSDs are pretty fast.
My work takes place at a beefy desktop machine. I wouldn't want it any other way... I get to plug in as many displays as I need, I get all the memory I need, I can add internal drives, there's no shortage of USB ports or expansion - and I get them cheap. For meetings or any kind of work away from my desk I'll remote in from one of my laptops.
All that and my preferred OS (Manjaro/XFCE), which runs on anything, has been more stable than any Mac I've ever owned. Every update to macOS has broken something or changed the UI drastically and in a way I have no control over...
If I ever switch away from desktops, it will be for a Framework laptop or something similar.
This is interesting - in the sense that you are someone who doesn’t want the UI to change, but it’s really not clear what this has to do with the question or the article.
I'm not the guy above, but I concur with the sentiments. After a while, adjusting to trivial UI changes becomes a huge chore and unnecessary cognitive overhead. It's relevant, because in order to use the M1, you have to buy into Apple's caprice.
Well, actually I have a beastmode mobile workstation that gets maybe 3 hours of battery life on high intensity. And when the battery is depleted I find a table with an outlet and I plug it in.
Everything in the machine can be upgraded/fixed so it should be good for a while.
I’m not saying this to be snarky. I just want to emphasize that while M1 is great innovation, I put repairability/maintainability and longevity on a higher pedestal than other things. I also highly value many things a computer has to offer: disk, memory, CPU, GPU, etc. I want to be able to interchange those pieces; and I want to have a lot of each category at my disposal. Given this, battery life is not as important as the potential functionality a given machine can provide.
I suspect the number of people, even developers, for whom 16GB memory is plenty probably greatly exceeds the number who need a beast mode Ryzen. But even then, a large proportion of the devs who might need a Build farm on the back end would be doing that anyway so they might as well have an M1 Mac laptop regardless.
Not sure I’d agree with “harms noone.” I have taken LSD and easily walk in the middle of the road with no cause for concern. Imagine a child accidentally eating some of it, etc. Could be worse than a loaded gun.
I’m all for legalizing natural stuff (mushrooms, cannabis, even coca plants) but once chemists start concentrating things or turning them into droplets it becomes extremely dangerous.
For instance, mushrooms grow on poop (and taste like sh*t), coca leaves are probably bitter to the taste (and not agreeable). So not much incentive to accidentally eat them.
One tab—the whole sheet even—of LSD tasteless and odourless, even hard to detect.
My rebuttal is “alcohol”. That settles any safety related debate, let’s move on.
I’m dismissing “think of the children” and “equivalent to a tool designed to kill” (and that tool is completely legal in the US) lines as obvious trolls, I encourage anyone else rebutting to ignore that as well.
Edit: To dismiss your argument that you edited in about dosage size and accidental ingestion. If LSD was legal, manufacturers would want to prevent accidental ingestion and design an RoA that isn’t a tiny tab of LSD. Keeping it legal means it will remain as is now. You’re arguing for legalization and don’t even realize it.
Furthermore, a quick google search shows some academic papers from the 70s about children accidentally ingesting LSD, and a news report from 2016 where a child may have ingested LSD accidentally, but there’s very little evidence that it’s a problem.
I agree with all of what you’re saying, but the comment I reply to says it “harms noone.” I am saying it does harm people.
To be frank, I have taken a decent amount of LSD in teenage years and suffer permanent effects from it (all mental stuff like anxiety and paranoia). Granted some of it was probably made in someone’s garage (legal stuff could have some sort of standards). But still, LSD is dangerous and point being it has potential to make people do things without cause for concern, and cause damage to others. It also lasts easily 8-24 hours depending on dosage.
Another point: if LSD was legal, then it would be legal for a cult to use it in rituals and as a way to manipulate individuals. Think Charles Manson—that’s a lot more dangerous than run-of-the-mill narcotics.
> To be frank, I have taken a decent amount of LSD in teenage years and suffer permanent effects from it (all mental stuff like anxiety and paranoia).
What proof do you have that your anxiety and paranoia are caused by your teenage LSD intake? There are plenty of people who have issues with anxiety and paranoia that have never taken drugs.
Consider that 70-90% of schizophrenics are tobacco users, and most started young. This is an astounding rate of smoking for a population subgroup. Did tobacco use cause the schizophrenia or did schizophrenics seek out tobacco?
Plenty of cults operate without drugging their members with LSD, if it was effective I assume it would be more widespread considering mental, sexual, and physical abuse are illegal and used as tools by cult leaders to maintain the cult and its membership. See NXIVM for a recent example. Giving people LSD is far more benign than beating or raping them.
I had a bad trip and afterward I had anxiety. No anxiety before then.
I don’t have “Anxiety” requiring meds and such—the effects taper off over the years.
Believe me, I know the effects I felt and what it did to me—statistics and external “scientific proof” are not required.
Also, true there are many ways to manipulate people. It’s what you can make them do while they are on LSD that is scary. If you try LSD you will know what I mean—you could walk into a train without hesitation or fear. At least if the other methods are used to manipulate people their underlying emotions, hesitations, and consciousness is intact.
Again, I agree certain drugs should be legalized. And perhaps LSD can be therapeutic in a good way. But, it is also very dangerous stuff—more so than other drugs.
That is my opinion and not based on rigorous research. But I have done a lot of drugs in my day—and I can say if I went back in time I still would have done the natural stuff (mushrooms, cannabis) but never would touch the man-made chemicals.
So, you don’t have proof, you just happened to develop anxiety around the time you started taking LSD, which was as a teenager, a time of notable change.
> If you try LSD you will know what I mean—you could walk into a train without hesitation or fear.
I’ve done LSD a number of times, the most recent was 8 days ago. I’ve never lost the interest in self-preservation while tripping on LSD. You cannot control someone’s mind when they’re on LSD.
Please provide me with a drug that LSD is more dangerous than, keeping in mind that mind control with LSD isn’t possible. I’ve been a heroin addict and severe alcoholic, and I’ve also taken LSD a number of times. Being an addict/alcoholic is so much more dangerous and detrimental than any use of LSD than I find it hard to take you seriously when you make such claims.
Replace LSD in your argument with "alcohol", "bleach", "nailpolish remover", "cigarettes" or any other dangerous stuff you can find in the household that are supposed to be locked away when children are around. Yes, most of these are smelly, but toddlers can be too curious for their own good and are not that discerning for bad tastes yet.
Worse than a loaded gun? That’s insane, the gun can kill you. LSD can’t. There are a multitude of things in every household that a child could kill themselves with (various medicines, cleaning supplies, knives). That is not a reason to ban those things, it’s a reason not to leave small children unattended.
A child seems more likely to harm themselves with a kitchen knife than a blot paper lying around. But sure, I would support laws that makes you legally responsible for safe handling of the substance, like not giving it or making it accessible to minors.
On that note it is a great tool during development to get a piece working without connecting it to the broader application. Test driven development gives a nice debugging context that is easier to work with. The code coverage and regression part comes as a nice bonus feature.
I’d also like to add that if you contribute code to an open source project it is extremely beneficial to have iron-clad unit tests. Since there is so many devs it would be easy for someone to accidentally break something you fixed already.
I like 1995 era laptops more than modern ones. I also like the the plastic casings of desktops back then—they feel solid, same with the mechanical keyboards!
Today companies so busy trying to “slim things down.”
P.S. why doesn’t apple release a matte display laptop? I would buy it.
Apple used to release matte display laptops. You used to be able to get a hulking 17 inch macbook pro with an optional matte display. Today, you can buy a $15 matte film.
because the reason matte is matte, is that it scatters light hitting the screen. from either side of the screen. you didn't notice how blurry your screen was when it was already blurry from the low resolution. now screens have high resolution.
feel free to put a matte transparency on your high density screen to make it a low density screen. everyone else would rather have glare.
Isn’t that a mapping? Because the primary purpose of the string of glyphs is readable by humans. Such representation is mapped to the numerical representation for storage in the computer. It may also be mapped to lines of ink written on a piece of paper for transmission
Oh, in my example, it's just a coincidence that the number was readable by humans! Other numbers may come out as complete gibberish.
The "mapping" you may be referring to is happening outside and subject to how your brain /your browser interpret it. (How do you know that when I posted the comment, that I didn't supply the raw bits of the number?! ;-))
Anyway, it was just a joke for low level-programmers I guess. Have a good day ;-)
Yes, and every time I go to the grocery store my ability to hunt mammoths is reduced. Anesthesia reduces my ability to just deal with the pain of surgery. A pen reduces my ability to chisel words into stone.
Exposing us less to the challenges of the past is not a bug, it's a feature.
This seems like more a solution to open, transparent platforms. It’s a shame that we are going backwards: you used to be able to download software from the internet, direct from publishers with no limitations. Now everything’s all stupid requiring developers to beg the “powers that be” for access to distribute their work.
But that isn't sustainable anymore now that everyone and their mother does all sorts of sensitive thing on the internet. App Stores may not catch any and all malware, but they'll catch some, or even a lot, and they give Google (or whoever runs one) tools to deal with what slips through. They make getting new extensions transparent and they're trustworthy.
What's missing is legislation to level the playing field; either allow alternate stores on equal terms, or abide by rules that force you to play fair in your own store, things like that. There's no going back to the 90s, it's just a whole different world now.
Yeah I agree the legislation would help—but the legislators mostly don’t know much about tech I’m guessing. And the experts they call in I’d wager are from big companies with their own interests in mind.
Remember how when an older relative would complain about their computer slowing down, and you had to uninstall like 15 toolbars from their Internet Explorer?
Protecting users from malware and spyware is a huge step forward. Most users can't protect themselves from it. Controlled distribution is a net good for society. The question is, how do we minimize the negatives it also brings along with it, such as seemingly arbitrary, inconsistent, and/or vague rejections?
It's not about what we would personally prefer, as smart tech people who know how to protect ourselves. It's about what's best for everyone -- the societal good.
That was vastly preferable to the current status quo where your older relative doesn't even complain about their computer slowing down, because they've been trained by 20 years of planned obsolescence and unupgradable hardware to just buy a new one when given the slightest hint of a problem.
