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Mac, many reviews and benchmarks show that existing binaries run faster on M1 through Rosetta than they were working natively on the Intel platform. The new processor is so spectacular in every single aspect that it’s probably one of the best things Apple have introduced in the last years. It’s a revolution and is welcome. I haven’t heard of any app that doesn’t work. And the most popular ones will be migrated. What’s more, with a tiny update, all existing iOS apps will be able to run on M1.

I am sorry, but you clearly have no clue and still insist on your wrong assumptions. Low performer? What do you know? The performance is better in translation than intel natively. And it's 3 times natively. In one generation. With even lower power requirements. Again you are just assuming things you clearly don't know.
Big mistake? This is one of the biggest revolution in computer tech. Such improvements have never been seen. Developers will have to move to the new platform since the only alternative is to leave mac. And Apple is making their life as easy as possible with their Universal binaries. And with the huge advantage in performance that Macs are showing nobody is leaving, if anything this will attract more developers over time. Google has always refused to port Chrome to Windows on Arm and they already ported it to Apple Silicon. So no, this is no mistake, this is the best thing Apple has ever done, and it's just starting.

Spot on. I’m excited about this development and believe it was the right move. Now, Apple can control the most important part of their hardware, the processor, so that they are free to innovate faster and build better products than their competitors by not being tied to a chip maker.

I can’t wait to see what they come out with in the coming years. I own an iMac Pro and a Microsoft Surface Studio desktop, but my preference is for Apple’s hardware, as I develop for it and have always felt it was better integrated than that of Windows machines, and I think their move to their own chip will help them.

Make no mistake, it takes a huge capital investment to fabricate your own chips and it is only possible when you have the tremendous financial resources of Apple.

Yeah, and I would add fabricate them and make them better than the competition at the same time.... And they have updated only the entry level macs so far. Once they increase the number of cores for higher end macbooks the gap may widen even further.

What’s funny is their “weakest” laptop now, the MacBook Air with the M1 CPU and passive cooling has better single-core performance than their highest-spec MacBook Pro 16” from 2019 with Intel CPU. And the same multi-core performance. And then the M1 has much lower power consumption. If that’s not a ruthless smash, please tell me what is? 😀

Mac, I strongly recommend that you read or watch some of the many comparisons of the latest M1-powered Macs vs Intel-based Windows equivalents. I too was sceptical, however the results seem phenomenal.

One test I saw pitched the entry-level MacBook Pro against a more expensive Dell XPS. The Mac won every comparison test (battery life, thermal output, benchmark speed). The only exception was video editing in Adobe Premiere (which was a little slower), however this will likely improve as Adobe start releasing application updates that include native ARM binaries.

I’m a Windows user, however I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that Apple has revolutionised the computer industry with these new models - and they are just the entry level systems. Faster, cooler, more energy efficient, and cheaper.

Kind regards,
James
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It will be interesting to see how these new M1-based models affect the used MacBook market.

I think you are missing the point here, you are focusing on what they lose and not what they gain. The market share of Macs is growing slightly, but overall they are almost irrelevant for Apple revenue wise. What's relevant is mobile, that already makes most of the profits for Apple and is a growing market.

You are focusing on backwards compatibility for old apps, but you are missing that with an M1 EVERY iOS suddenly works on a Mac. There is a huge potential there. I just saw a video of someone running Cubasis 3 on an M1 Mac. The app isn't optimized so there are troubles with screen size etc, but overall it works basically out of the box.

So some people will have to re-optimize their stuff for OSX? Big deal, the large players like Adobe, Ableton or NI are going to provide this anyway with their new versions. But literally everyone who makes apps for iOS can now publish to OSX. The sacrifice that you have to run old apps without optimization is not going to count in the long run.

Apple just stepped out of a relatively tiny ecosystem that was their OSX into one of the most dominating ecosystems today and made them one and the same thing.

If have turned away from Apple quite some time ago for my desktops and laptops. That's the first thing they did in at least 5 years that I would call exiting.

Probably negatively. However I think until there is no Windows solution on Apple Silicon Intel Macs will have that advantage. From what I have seen, Windows support is going to be much harder than some people believe, and Parallels may have a very hard time managing to make it work on M1, since the virtualisation capabilities built in Apple Silicon are for other ARM operating systems only. To be honest so far even Microsoft has had a hard time making Windows compatible with ARM, and they could modifiy the source code to try and make it work, so it's going to be even harder for a third party like Parallels without that capability.... Of course a much easier thing would be porting Windows on Arm on Mac, even as a bootcamp solution, but that's a differnt story and requires Microsoft to allow it...

Why in the world do we need Windows on the Mac? The sooner Windows is left behind, the better. I bought a Windows machine to run Staffpad but other than that, I don’t need Windows for anything. There are plenty of excellent apps on the Mac, and opening up the laptop and eventually desktops to run the App Store apps will give even more choice.

As an Apple developer, it’s exciting to think about writing an app that will run on mobile as well as laptop and desktop machines.

I don’t see why on earth we need Windows on a Mac computer?! Any particular reason for loving an unpredictable, vulnerable, ineffective OS that still can’t restore application state on restart and where stopping updates from hijacking the CPU is getting close to impossible.

There is an application in the business world because some stuff like book keeping software doesn't run on Macs so you have to make due with virtual machines. The whole thing is a massive crotch of course and this is such a tiny minority that I can't really fault Apple for not caring about that much.

Right. Some people are still running business apps on MS-DOS. Apple should not care about these niche markets at the expense of the vast number of users who want to move forward with better software and hardware.

Mac and I are old, so please bear with us!

First thing is, yes, I’m always skeptical about any ‘breakthroughs’ claimed by Apple because they make these claims at every launch: “the fastest this, the best that, the rest is just crap”, yet as of recent they have not been delivering, if we’re going to be frank!

That being said, I see how this could be different, and perhaps it is a step in the right direction (the power of the M1 alone indicates this).

Now, about the translator (Mrs. Rosetta) I do have my reservations. Yes, it seems like some programs are running much faster through Rosetta on the M1 than natively on the ‘older’ Macs, but I wonder if it’s all about speed, and I ask, what about stability, consistency, and all-round fluidity?

My impression is that it’s always better to speak the native language than to have someone else translate it for you. Something always gets lost in translation (even Sofia Coppola agrees with me on this)!

There are still many people using old software because they prefer it. In the film industry, for example, while many editors jumped ship after the launch of Final Cut Pro X, some stayed with Final Cut Pro 7 and still use it.

Some studios use old versions of AVID's Pro Tools for recording and post production. Some popular classical music recording engineers use software that's only available on Windows (Pyramix, Sequoia, SADiE), and some of those use Macs as the hardwire is a known quantity.

It's not a matter of needing windows, it's a matter of needing windows apps that developers never bothered to port to Mac. I have never considered moving to mac because for my daily work I need windows app that are not available on Mac. If you don't work with any of those apps, fine you don't need windows nor any virtualisation....

I had a developer friend who used a virtual machine for his development environment, when he didn’t have to, and there was a perceptible pause with every keystroke, something I could not tolerate.

If developers abandon their apps, people should find substitutes.

Software development is about moving forward, not about holding on to the apps of the past.

My thoughts exactly, and to think that this is an opening salvo is astonishing. I'm not sure if it says more about Apple's design, TSMC's 5nm process, or Intel's absolute failure over the last 3 years, but this is a huge challenge to x86.

Sometimes there are no (better) substitutes. People are capable of deciding what works best for them.

These new Macs are causing enough of a wave that if I were a VST maker, I'd recompile and re-release my old VST+Player as an M1 universal binary just because I know a horde of new buyers will be entering the market and will be looking for native apps. It's kind of a marketing no-brainer.