[VIDEO] There’s a lot of gear here, but what grabbed my attention was the look at that new 31.5″ OLED LG display right at the beginning of the video.
LG has been steadily improving their display lineup, with each new generation seemingly custom made with the Mac in mind. Take a look. Video embedded in main Loop post.
Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:
When the M1 MacBook Air, M1 MacBook Pro 13-inch, and M1 Mac mini models arrived in customers’ hands, a number of owners almost immediately began reporting various Bluetooth problems ranging from intermittent disconnects of wireless peripherals to completely non-functional Bluetooth connections.
This is great news. I’m hoping that same team is working on a fix for the broken Big Sur, Safari iCloud tabs that make it a bit of a nightmare to share pasteboard and iCloud tabs between machines.
100% reproducible for me, have heard from a fair number of people with the same issue. Feedback submitted.
Jason Snell:
A recurring game on Incomparable’s Game Show podcast is a modern take on Family Feud, a show where contestants guess the answers that people gave in a survey. (We did a version of this, with Apple themed questions, for the Relay FM 5th anniversary show.) Last summer I fielded a survey with Star Wars questions—but never wanted to do the hard work of compiling the answers.
The problem with these sorts of surveys is, they’re all based on free-form text boxes. And people don’t answer in a consistent fashion—they misspell things, phrase responses differently, you name it. And yet at the end, I need to say “38 people said Han Solo, 24 people said Luke Skywalker.”
This is where BBEdit saved me an enormous amount of time, and I thought I’d share what I did so that you don’t have to waste your time in the future.
This is just one example of the incredible power of BBEdit. There are so many times when I need to do some sort of data or text manipulation and after a bit of digging, turns out BBEdit has a tool to do what I need.
Jason does an excellent guided tour here, showing exactly how BBEdit solved a knotty problem.
As I’ve mentioned many times, when I get a new Mac, the two apps that I install first are BBEdit and Keyboard Maestro.
Follow the headline link and scroll through the images. The first one shows an open MacBook, with an iPhone and Apple Watch laid on either side of the trackpad. Both devices were wirelessly charging.
True, the devices would get in the way if you were trying to actually type on your Mac, but if you were doing something else and wanted a quick charge, your open MacBook would make a convenient Qi charger. And would mean one less thing to pack for a road trip (when road trips become a thing again).
The second image is even better. It shows a bunch of Apple devices stacked on top of a closed MacBook. Presumably all of them were charging, though I’d assume multiplestacked devices would slow down the charge time proportionately. But it looks like there are multiple coils, so maybe not?
It’s a patent, not necessarily something in the works, but I do think it’s an interesting idea.
Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac:
Along with the shift to Apple Silicon, performing things like a restore is different with M1 Macs compared to their Intel predecessors. Follow along for a look at how to revive and restore M1 Macs, what the difference is, when to use them, and what to try before taking those steps.
Do you know the difference between a revive and restore? If not, give this a quick read, get the basic model in your head so you don’t have to start from scratch when a Mac emergency hits. This is the new way.
Big Sur brings a frustrating interface change to notifications. This post documents the change in great detail. It’s all about the process of dismissing a notification, which is much harder than it used to be, both in terms of fine motor control requirements and low discoverability.
Read the post, see if you agree.
Have an M1 Mac? Use Zoom?
If both, head over to the headline-link, then click the Download Center link to get to the download page, then look for this sentence:
Or, for Macs with the M1 processor, click here to download
The word here is the link you want.
Or, avoid the back and forth and just click this download link.
The whole thing is a bit cryptic, but glad to see this update.
Howard Oakley digs into the details of the M1 Mac startup process.
Very technical, arcane even, but I found it fascinating.
Crowdsourced site gathering info on games running on M1 Macs. Is the game playable? If so, what environment (Rosetta 2? Crossover emulation? Native?), frame rate, resolution?
Follow the headline link and search for a game, or simply scroll down and see what games do what. A great resource.
Bloomberg:
Chip engineers at the Cupertino, California-based technology giant are working on several successors to the M1 custom chip, Apple’s first Mac main processor that debuted in November. If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public.
And:
Intel’s shares slid 1.7% in early trading in New York Monday after the news.
My gut is to be skeptical that Apple can build a chip that can take on a PC with a discrete GPU. But the M1 has definitely under promised and over delivered, crushing all my expectations.
And:
Apple engineers are also developing more ambitious graphics processors. Today’s M1 processors are offered with a custom Apple graphics engine that comes in either 7- or 8-core variations. For its future high-end laptops and mid-range desktops, Apple is testing 16-core and 32-core graphics parts.
Skeptical, but also skeptical of my skepticism. Could we see future mid-priced Macs that beat high-end gaming PCs with high-end GPU cards? With the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, the CPU performance (especially showing off in single core benchmarks) is astounding, the GPU performance still less than a home built PC with a moderately high end GPU.
High hopes for the Mac’s future. Looking forward to the next Mac reveal.
Rob Griffiths did as the title suggested, launched 75 apps on the M1 in an effort to see how that impacted the M1 MacBook Pro. Read the post, amazing to me how brilliantly the M1 Macs handle what people are throwing at it.
Also worth reading, Rob’s followup post, a more comprehensive review on the M1 MacBook Pro.
A bit of a spoiler:
I’ve had my M1 MacBook Pro for a few weeks now, and I can confidently say this is the best-performing Mac laptop I’ve ever owned—and not just because of its benchmark scores. It’s that the entire system has been designed to take advantage of Apple’s homebuilt powerful but low-power CPU. As I use the machine, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s the basically the lowest-end ARM chipped Mac you’ll ever be able to buy.
I’m still loving my M1 MacBook Air, can’t wait to see what Apple rolls out to bring the iMac and Mac Pro into the M1 family.
Every time I hear the Gruber-coined term claim chowder, I think of this post:
“Is Apple serious competition?: Palm CEO Ed Colligan seems downright nonchalant about rumors that Apple may introduce a mobile phone to market in the coming year.”
And:
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Delicious.
Now follow the headline link, where Jean-Louis Gassée shares some Apple Arm claim chowder. Not quite as momentous as that original, quoted above, but an interesting read, nonetheless.
Side note: I find it interesting that “Claim Chowder” has an entry in Urban Dictionary. Also interesting: Go into Wikipedia and type claim chowder in the search field.
Tim Standing, OWC blog [Via TidBITS]:
Each pair of Thunderbolt ports on my Intel Mac is connected to a single bus powered by a dedicated controller chip. Since the two ports in a pair are connected to one bus, they share the Thunderbolt bandwidth. The total throughput of both ports together on a single bus is limited to 2,800 MB/sec.
And:
You can confirm the number of Thunderbolt buses in your Mac by viewing the System Report window (select About This Mac in the Apple menu and then click the System Report… button). Then click on Thunderbolt in the column on the left. Here is what I see on my 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro, showing the two Thunderbolt buses. (4 ports = 2 pairs of ports = 2 Thunderbolt buses).
Yup, confirmed, worth a look.
But on the M1 Mac mini:
System Report indicates that there are two Thunderbolt buses, one for each of the Thunderbolt ports!! This means that each port has its own dedicated bus and doesn’t have to share its bandwidth with any other port. Each one will have 2,800 MB/sec all to itself.
And:
The M1 Macs are the first Macs with support for the Thunderbolt hub feature found in Thunderbolt 4. Thunderbolt 4 requires computer makers to implement a whole set of features, most of which were optional in Thunderbolt 3. These features have actually been found in almost all Macs that Apple has shipped in the past four years, so the move to Thunderbolt 4 isn’t a huge change for Mac users.
These features include 40 Gb/sec Thunderbolt ports, support for charging laptops over Thunderbolt, and protection from malicious hardware that might try and snoop computer memory over Thunderbolt. The one feature in Thunderbolt 4 new to the Mac is the support of Thunderbolt Hubs.
The article goes on with some testing and details, along with a pitch for their own OWC Thunderbolt Hub. Hub needs aside, I found the bandwidth info worth knowing.
[VIDEO] Linus, of Linus Tech Tips, titled his original hot take on Apple’s M1 keynote “Apple Silicon Mac Announcement – Slow Motion Dumpster Fire.”
Lots of people expressed their doubts, publicly. Too much hype, graphs without real numbers, impossible claims. You get the idea, you’ve maybe had doubts of your own.
To his credit, Linus makes no bones about his hot take, and weighs in with his actual experience and destroyed (in a good way) expectations. And it also offers a solid look at the experience of running iOS apps on your M1 Mac. Linus’s video is embedded in the main Loop post.
Related note: Linus briefly touches on the process of finding and downloading an iOS app, but I thought this post offered a little more detail and insight.
Apple Terminal:
In just under 2 weeks since launch, the M1 powered Mac mini has catapulted Apple to the top rank in the desktop market in Japan by a whopping 14.4%, according to market data by BCN Retail.
Data between August and November 3rd, a little more than a week prior to the launch of the M1 Mac mini shows Apple at around 15% share in the desktop market, behind Lenovo Japan. However, following the launch of the new Mac mini on November 17th, Apple charged forward to a whopping 27.1% market share, a 14.4% increase from just the start of the month.
Looking forward to seeing the first sales reports of Apple Silicon M1 Macs. Anecdotally, they are selling like hotcakes. And there’s plenty of unexplored territory to come: Perhaps an Apple Silicon iMac, or even a Mac Pro with some form of discrete GPU and expandable RAM.
You know me. I love a good headline.
But that’s (almost) never enough. And this post is a good one. It’s a rollup of tons of public takes on the magic of the M1 Macs. Fun to scroll through, even if you just scan the tweets.
And it’s a pretty great headline.
[VIDEO] Rene Ritchie digs into the question of whether or not to plunk down the extra bucks to upgrade your M1 order from 8GB to 16GB. Video embedded in main Loop post.
The whole video is fascinating and focused on the topic at hand. But if you are short on time, jump to 3:05 and start listening there. And keep going, even after the “my recommendation is” section. Thoughtful breakdown of the topic, worth your time.
Jason Snell:
I love Rogue Amoeba’s audio apps and rely on them every day. Audio Hijack is the best. Loopback is a vital tool when I’m streaming video live.
With you on this, Jason. I use Audio Hijack every week to record The Dalrymple Report. It is lightweight, easy to use, and let’s me customize my recording process precisely.
This year, though, Apple made some major changes to how audio on macOS is handled, and that required major changes to ACE, the engine that enables most of Rogue Amoeba’s apps. The company managed to get versions supporting Big Sur out just before the official release of the operating system, and today it posted beta versions that work with M1 Macs.
I wanted to do this week’s podcast from my new M1, but ran into a brick wall trying to run Audio Hijack. It put up a “this won’t work” alert when I launched it. Feh.
But good news on the new M1 beta versions. But, as Jason says, there’s a catch:
There is one big caveat, however, and it’s all down to Apple’s increased focus on security. To install an app like ACE, which requires a system extension to function in Big Sur, you have to reboot. That’s not great—rebooting to install software feels very 1990s to me—but at least it’s palatable.
On M1 Macs, though, the situation intensifies. Before you can reboot to enable ACE, you first have to reboot into Recovery Mode in order to tell the system to allow extensions. Then you have to change a setting from “Full Security” to “Reduced Security,” and check a box allowing kernel extensions from identified developers.
I’ve jumped through these hoops, and they are both intimidating and cryptic. Neither are Rogue Amoeba’s fault. If I want to use Audio Hijack, I have to jump through the cryptic hoops, and trust that it’s OK to accept “reduced security”.
I get it. I just hate that this is where we’ve landed. And, hopefully, I’ll be using Audio Hijack to record this week’s podcast.
[VIDEO] This is Steve Jobs talking about multi-touch gestures during the Mac OS X Lion rollout.
Jump to 3:44 for the relevant discussion. Video embedded in main Loop post.
[VIDEO] Just in case you were wondering if it was possible to run multiple displays on the M1 Mac mini and MacBook Air, this video (embedded on main Loop post) should answer your question.
This is a very interesting article comparing four different machines on how they tackle specific tasks using Adobe software. Definitely a test on the Pro side of things.
The four machines:
Note that second two machines are desktop machines, coming in at $2400 and $3500 respectively, with the last machine built with 64GB RAM. And those two desktop machines feature external GPUs.
In a nutshell, the desktop machines outperform the M1 Macs. Lots of reasons for this, and not really a fair comparison, since the Macs are laptops, and the desktop machines have discrete GPUs, and are much more expensive.
But I did find the comparison worth seeing.
From the conclusions:
From a performance standpoint, the new Apple M1 MacBooks do fairly well considering that they are using a complete processor based around the ARM instruction set and software that is likely not fully optimized yet. But compared to a typical desktop workstation from Puget Systems that is around 2-3x faster on average (albeit at a higher cost), they certainly can’t keep up.
These units only cost around $1,500 as configured, however, so the fact that they are half the performance shouldn’t be unexpected since they are also half the cost. What will be very interesting to see is how performance will shake out as Adobe improves support for native Apple Silicon and when (or if) Apple launches a higher-end laptop – or even better, a more powerful desktop variant than the Mac Mini.
That last bit sticks out to me. Will we see a higher end M1 laptop with more RAM? Will we see an M1 Mac Pro? If we do see a desktop Mac Pro, will it feature a discrete GPU?
[H/T Evadne W]
With the advent of the M1 Mac, a question that sticks in my mind is, “Is 8GB on an M1 more effective than 8GB on an Intel Mac?”
This question first emerged for me when I was deciding between an 8GB or 16GB M1. I ended up going with 16GB, but mostly driven by memories of my old 8GB Intel Mac and the constant appearance of the rainbow cursor of death until I upgraded to 16GB.
Is that still a valid worry? Is there something magic about unified memory on the M1?
If you also have this question, you might want to check out this Twitter post and, more importantly, the responses that follow.
If I had to boil it down, I’d say, if you’re ordering an M1, 8GB should be plenty, if all you do is “normal” stuff, like email, reasonably small document editing, and web browsing. If you are more of a power user, do some light programming, occasional video rendering, small Logic Pro audio projects, etc., then 16GB might be worth the investment.
And if you do anything with very large data files, such as massive photo editing, large project programming, regular large scaled video editing, you might want to wait until more memory becomes available.
That’s purely my layman’s opinion. But it’s where I’ve landed, at least at this point.
Turning to the linked article, here’s Jason Snell:
The biggest difference is that in the M1, the memory is a part of the M1 architecture itself. There’s no memory slot or slots on the motherboard of an M1 Mac, nor is there an area where a memory chip has been permanently soldered on. Instead, the memory is integrated into the same package that contains the M1 itself.
What this means is that when you buy an M1-based Mac and choose a memory configuration, that’s it. There have been many other Macs with soldered-on memory that couldn’t be upgraded, but this is a little different, since the memory is basically part of the M1 package itself.
And that explains why we’ve only got two choices when it comes to memory: 8GB or 16GB.
The M1 processor’s memory is a single pool that’s accessible by any portion of the processor. If the system needs more memory for graphics, it can allocate that. If it needs more memory for the Neural Engine, likewise. Even better, because all the aspects of the processor can access all of the system memory, there’s no performance hit when the graphics cores need to access something that was previously being accessed by a processor core. On other systems, the data has to be copied from one portion of memory to another—but on the M1, it’s just instantly accessible.
And:
What would cause your Mac to run out of physical memory? If you leave an awful lot of apps open at once, or if your browser has hundreds of tabs open, or if you’re using an app that loads a very large file (like, say, a Photoshop file) into memory. If you’re someone who does this a lot, you probably want more memory…. but then again, if you’re someone who does this a lot, you might not want to buy one an M1 Mac right now. The mid-range and high-end models that will undoubtedly offer more RAM options and more processor power are undoubtedly coming next year.
This seems right on.
That said, I’m living on my M1 MacBook Air with 16GB and I have yet to stress it in any way, doing my regular power user stuff. I’ve never done a single thing to slow it down, even running apps via Rosetta. And, as I’ve said before, the M1 is wicked fast, and the battery life is crazy good.
My experience, as a relatively early adopter of this new technology, has been aces. Zero regrets.
I’ve now spent a few days living with one of Apple’s new M1 laptops. I have to say, the experience has been glorious, every bit as good as the hype hinted at.
I’ve run power hungry apps side-by-side, on both my M1 MacBook Air and a 2018 Intel MacBook Pro, and it’s not even close. As an example, I ran an audio-processing app that analyzes and modifies audio files, byte-by-byte. Lots of disk access, lots of multi-thread processing. Chewing through an hour long audio file on the Intel machine took about 10 seconds. On the M1? It was done before I could even switch windows. Ridiculous performance. And this was in Rosetta.
Part of this is the double-speed SSD, part of this the M1 itself. But I feel comfortable saying, this machine screams, and Rosetta is an amazing piece of technology. Add in the crazy good battery life, and this feels like one of the best Apple purchases I’ve ever made.
With that in mind, click the headline link and follow along as Craig Federighi, Johny Srouji, and Greg Joswiak tell us the Apple Silicon story. A wonderful read, worth setting aside a few minutes to make your way through the whole thing.
[VIDEO] Joanna Stern and John Gruber appeared on Squawk Alley to talk M1. The interview was interesting enough, but part of the discussion was the quality of the new M1 Mac webcam. Without sound on, can you tell which video feed looks the best? The video is embedded in the main Loop post.
With your answer locked in, turn on the sound. I found this interesting. All the complaints about the 720p FaceTime camera seem overblown. Judge for yourself.
Nothing complex here, but worth a look if you’ve got an M1 Mac coming.
The Info window for universal apps includes the setting “Open using Rosetta.” It enables email apps, web browsers, and other apps to use add-ons that haven’t been updated to support Apple silicon. If an app doesn’t recognize a plug-in, extension, or other add-on, quit the app, select this setting, and try again.
Key is that “Open using Rosetta” checkbox in the app’s Get Info window and the “Kind” field which tells you if the app is a Universal Binary or Intel or Apple Silicon native.
[VIDEO] This video (embedded in the main Loop post) is a nice, detailed look at the differences you can expect if you plunk down the extra bucks for an M1 MacBook Pro.
Lots of detail here. Bottom line, it’ll be worth it if you need to squeeze more performance out of your machine. But watch the video, see if these differences matter to you.
[VIDEO] How fast is the new M1 MacBook Air? More specifically, how fast is that SSD inside?
Watch the video embedded in the main Loop post. Exploding brain emoji.
If you’re thinking about a new M1 Mac mini, definitely spend some time with Chris Welch’s review for The Verge.
Most importantly:
Getting up and running with the Mac mini can be a hassle. For initial setup, you need a wired keyboard and mouse; my Logitech ergonomic keyboard and MX Master 3, which both connect over Bluetooth, were useless. They work fine after setting up the machine, but just be aware so you don’t run into this initial headache like I did.
This is so important, I think Apple should put a note up on the order page so folks have time to grab these items if they need them.
UPDATE: Interestingly, it seems as if Apple’s wireless gear uses clever USB-protocol tricks so THEY work with the Mac mini setup. Not so for third party gear. Good to know.
[VIDEO] To some folks, fan noise really matters. If you do a podcast, you’ve no doubt spent some time finding and reducing as much noise as possible from your studio setup. And fans are subtle culprits.
In the video embedded in the main Loop post, The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern does a fun job talking about the gift of silence we’ve all gotten with the powerful, fanless M1 MacBook Air.
But in this review, John Gruber makes the case that the new M1 MacBook Pro’s active cooling system is no slouch at silence:
Apple, in its keynote last week, emphasized that the M1 MacBook Air has no fan. (Intel-based MacBook Airs most definitely do. The defunct 12-inch no-adjective MacBook was Apple’s only fanless Intel Mac.) Apple’s point there was to brag that the M1 runs so cool that a high-performance MacBook could be designed without one. Some Mac users, I think, mistakenly took this to mean that the Air had an advantage over the M1 MacBook Pro, in that the fanless Air would always run silently, if sometimes slower. I think this assumption was wrong: the M1 MacBook Pro is, to my ears, always silent as well. Whatever its active cooling system is doing, it isn’t making even a whisper of noise.
This is a point worth noting. The lack of a fan definitely pushed me towards the MacBook Air. The lower cost and smaller size also brought value, so no regrets, but I think Gruber’s point is well taken. The MacBook Pro can run silent, even if you push it.
Andrei Frumusanu, AnandTech:
During the launch event, one thing that was in Apple fashion typically missing from the presentation were actual details on the clock frequencies of the design, as well as its TDP which it can sustain at maximum performance.
Apple got a lot of press on the low detail on its M1 charts. To me, this turned out to be an amazing job of underpromising and overdelivering. Everywhere you look, people are amazed at the low heat, high performance, and great battery life of all three M1 Macs.
But if it’s details you want, AnandTech has them, at least for the M1 Mac mini.
One example:
We can confirm that in single-threaded workloads, Apple’s Firestorm cores now clock in at 3.2GHz, a 6.66% increase over the 3GHz frequency of the Apple A14. As long as there’s thermal headroom, this clock also applies to all-core loads, with in addition to 4x 3.2GHz performance cores also seeing 4x Thunder efficiency cores at 2064MHz, also quite a lot higher than 1823MHz on the A14.
If this floats your boat, there’s a lot more detail, well presented in graphs, in the linked article. But if you just want the bottom line:
The performance of the new M1 in this “maximum performance” design with a small fan is outstandingly good. The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets.
What’s really important for the general public and Apple’s success is the fact that the performance of the M1 doesn’t feel any different than if you were using a very high-end Intel or AMD CPU. Apple achieving this in-house with their own design is a paradigm shift, and in the future will allow them to achieve a certain level of software-hardware vertical integration that just hasn’t been seen before and isn’t achieved yet by anybody else.
Amazing achievement on Apple’s part.