Well, there’s nothing yet that even resembles a comparable replacement with a different architecture (RISC-V?). So even if they were angling for that, it would have to be at least 3 years away, plus if Intel and Power PC are anything to go by, there’s another 5 years until they drop support. So at a minimum, if someone buys a M-series laptop today, they can expect support for 8 years.
Not terrible, given how Microsoft left 3-year-old computers unsupported by surprise with the TPM requirement in Windows 11.
there’s nothing yet that even resembles a comparable replacement with a different architecture (RISC-V?).
There are a bunch of comparable x86 processors such as Panther Lake and Qualcomm.
Not terrible, given how Microsoft left 3-year-old computers unsupported by surprise
They also supported 10+ year old computers for a long time. But MS shouldn’t be the bar we hold these companies too. Some dude was able to add support for the latest MacOS to 20 year old computers in his spare time, so we know it’s not that hard, and nothing at all to one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They don’t do it because they make more money selling new computers.
But can it finally run Minecraft better than a 10 year old cheap Intel?
EDIT: For the downvoters - my pet peeves with Apple is that they advertised M chips as universally powerful and good, a serious competitor to Intel. It’s a mobile chip with instructions mostly for media encoding and decoding. It’s like comparing Prius to a bulldozer. If your workstation involves watching YouTube and using final cut pro, then sure, but anything remotely more advanced mostly falls apart on it. Don’t even get me started on AI and how slow the unified memory is
Many plugins and apps I use don’t really work with GPU/Hardware acceleration when it comes to rendering, same applies to encoding in different codecs. I’d know, because I’ve been unfortunately doing this shit for nearly 20 years and building my workstations (definitely not ARM, screw your downvotes and love for it) around it.
Pretty much every serious studio out there uses either EPYC or Xeon and to me it seems ridiculous that apparently majority here doesn’t see the problem with my initial argument of apple marketing these chips as God-tier and beat-them-all, when clearly, as it has been proven before, apple heavily misleads with their marketing and it’s not as simple as it seems.
EDIT: And people who feel like arguing by bullshitting accusations (like the guy above about me not knowing anything) are basically how redditors argued.
You put editing and watching YouTube under the same umbrella
Video encoding and decoding is generally under the same category - video processing.
What editing software do you use?
Like, right now, or have used (pretty long list)? My favourite is still After Effects just because of how used to it I am, but I seriously do not feel like listing all the plugins and extra apps (probably any professional knows about mocha/syntheyes or nuke). That’s my main, I’ve even learned to mostly skip premiere (still gotta use media encoder for obvious reasons). For 3d stuff and effects - Cinema 4D (FumeFX, xparticles, realflow, etc). Good enough, detective?
But the big data centers doing all the video processing for the big video services (including both permanent videos from a library and things like live streaming) are encoding the videos with settings that require less computational power to decode. The idea is to be able to let even old budget smartphones still be able to display the video with very low power requirements on the client device. There’s no universe where consumers decoding digital video will be a high-power computational task.
Restaurants have sharp knives in the kitchen, but generally serve food that requires only minimal cutting effort from the table knives set out with the rest of the table settings. Dining will always be easier than cooking, by a margin that makes the difficulty of dining not worth mentioning, so it would be bizarre to criticize a knife as being only good for cooking and eating food, when plenty of dining tableware knives out there would be insufficient for kitchen work.
You’ve made the mistake of lumping decoding and encoding together based on the algorithmic/mathematical similarity of those tasks, when everyone else is more inclined to discuss the very different end user use cases of those computing needs.
Yeah, I played large modpacks at good fps decade ago.
It’s not about whether you can use AI (obviously they can, commonly even larger models than similar laptops due to unified memory), it’s about how fast it is.
Gemma ran at 50/tops
Qwen 27B? was way slower , 5/tops
8B models run perfectly fine, but are mostly useless for chat and agents.
8B is only good for specialists. Like one 8B model that can only write and correct python3 code.
And then only in English.
Just like “optimization for games don’t matter anymore because everyone has 32gb of ram”, right? Because ARM is just simple RISC, right? https://simplifycpp.org/?id=a0882
What you consider unimportant is actually super important in cyber security by the way.
Actually I tried some of their silicon-optimized modern ports like the Resident Evil 2 Remake on a MacBook Air (The one that doesn’t even have active cooling) and I was taken aback by just how well it ran.
Of course it’s not a gaming PC, but it for sure punches well above its class with the games it runs.
For a bit of fun I recently installed Horizon Zero Dawn on my M2 Air using Crossover, just to see how it fared.
I got a perfectly respectable 25fps, or thereabouts.
This is a three year old, fanless, entry-level laptop, playing a game that’s not even written for its architecture at a rate that’s entirely playable. It’s actually crazy how good that hardware is.
I have a 2019 MacBook Pro and stopped updating it at Sonoma. The new OSes are just too much for that Intel chip anyway.
The M-series processors are amazing though, I’ve had such a good experience with them.
Yeah, say what you will about Apple, but they really nailed the M processors.
Just install Asahi or Fedora and get your speed back.
Right up until Apple drops support for them too
Well, there’s nothing yet that even resembles a comparable replacement with a different architecture (RISC-V?). So even if they were angling for that, it would have to be at least 3 years away, plus if Intel and Power PC are anything to go by, there’s another 5 years until they drop support. So at a minimum, if someone buys a M-series laptop today, they can expect support for 8 years.
Not terrible, given how Microsoft left 3-year-old computers unsupported by surprise with the TPM requirement in Windows 11.
There are a bunch of comparable x86 processors such as Panther Lake and Qualcomm.
They also supported 10+ year old computers for a long time. But MS shouldn’t be the bar we hold these companies too. Some dude was able to add support for the latest MacOS to 20 year old computers in his spare time, so we know it’s not that hard, and nothing at all to one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They don’t do it because they make more money selling new computers.
But can it finally run Minecraft better than a 10 year old cheap Intel?
EDIT: For the downvoters - my pet peeves with Apple is that they advertised M chips as universally powerful and good, a serious competitor to Intel. It’s a mobile chip with instructions mostly for media encoding and decoding. It’s like comparing Prius to a bulldozer. If your workstation involves watching YouTube and using final cut pro, then sure, but anything remotely more advanced mostly falls apart on it. Don’t even get me started on AI and how slow the unified memory is
idk, I use a gaming PC for that stuff.
The Mac’s are for work and creation.
Everything you’ve said here let’s me know that you have no idea what you’re taking about. Lumping video editing with watching YouTube lmao.
It’s called decoding and encoding…
Which is heavy on the CPU and GPU…
You don’t know much about encoding or decoding either.
Many plugins and apps I use don’t really work with GPU/Hardware acceleration when it comes to rendering, same applies to encoding in different codecs. I’d know, because I’ve been unfortunately doing this shit for nearly 20 years and building my workstations (definitely not ARM, screw your downvotes and love for it) around it.
Pretty much every serious studio out there uses either EPYC or Xeon and to me it seems ridiculous that apparently majority here doesn’t see the problem with my initial argument of apple marketing these chips as God-tier and beat-them-all, when clearly, as it has been proven before, apple heavily misleads with their marketing and it’s not as simple as it seems.
EDIT: And people who feel like arguing by bullshitting accusations (like the guy above about me not knowing anything) are basically how redditors argued.
You put editing and watching YouTube under the same umbrella and then speak of using EYPIC and XEON CPUs?
What editing software do you use?
Video encoding and decoding is generally under the same category - video processing.
Like, right now, or have used (pretty long list)? My favourite is still After Effects just because of how used to it I am, but I seriously do not feel like listing all the plugins and extra apps (probably any professional knows about mocha/syntheyes or nuke). That’s my main, I’ve even learned to mostly skip premiere (still gotta use media encoder for obvious reasons). For 3d stuff and effects - Cinema 4D (FumeFX, xparticles, realflow, etc). Good enough, detective?
But the big data centers doing all the video processing for the big video services (including both permanent videos from a library and things like live streaming) are encoding the videos with settings that require less computational power to decode. The idea is to be able to let even old budget smartphones still be able to display the video with very low power requirements on the client device. There’s no universe where consumers decoding digital video will be a high-power computational task.
Restaurants have sharp knives in the kitchen, but generally serve food that requires only minimal cutting effort from the table knives set out with the rest of the table settings. Dining will always be easier than cooking, by a margin that makes the difficulty of dining not worth mentioning, so it would be bizarre to criticize a knife as being only good for cooking and eating food, when plenty of dining tableware knives out there would be insufficient for kitchen work.
You’ve made the mistake of lumping decoding and encoding together based on the algorithmic/mathematical similarity of those tasks, when everyone else is more inclined to discuss the very different end user use cases of those computing needs.
And yet the “mobile chip” in my Mac Studio absolutely crushes my 9800x3d while using almost half the power.
I play Minecraft with the PrismLauncher on the M4 24GB. Shaders and DistantHorizon. 50-80fps
AI also works. Gemma 4 26B a4b MLX runs… somehow.
Yeah, I played large modpacks at good fps decade ago.
It’s not about whether you can use AI (obviously they can, commonly even larger models than similar laptops due to unified memory), it’s about how fast it is.
Gemma ran at 50/tops Qwen 27B? was way slower , 5/tops 8B models run perfectly fine, but are mostly useless for chat and agents. 8B is only good for specialists. Like one 8B model that can only write and correct python3 code. And then only in English.
Yeah, instruction sets don’t matter that much with modern processors. Try bullshitting harder.
Just like “optimization for games don’t matter anymore because everyone has 32gb of ram”, right? Because ARM is just simple RISC, right? https://simplifycpp.org/?id=a0882
What you consider unimportant is actually super important in cyber security by the way.
So super important that it’s not important at all.
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die
Did you even read what you sent me? Do point out to me the part about cybersecurity, I’m waiting.
EDIT: Actually, it’s a great article.
Actually I tried some of their silicon-optimized modern ports like the Resident Evil 2 Remake on a MacBook Air (The one that doesn’t even have active cooling) and I was taken aback by just how well it ran.
Of course it’s not a gaming PC, but it for sure punches well above its class with the games it runs.
For a bit of fun I recently installed Horizon Zero Dawn on my M2 Air using Crossover, just to see how it fared.
I got a perfectly respectable 25fps, or thereabouts.
This is a three year old, fanless, entry-level laptop, playing a game that’s not even written for its architecture at a rate that’s entirely playable. It’s actually crazy how good that hardware is.