Apple Operating Systems (macOS, iOS, watchOS, & tvOS) Catch-All

I've tended to prefer mine without a case, but the 12 Mini is an exception. The glass finish on the back makes it just hard enough to find the face by feel in the dark, and I think I want to smooth out the camera bump. I'm really wary of making it too much bigger though. I like the small form factor.

I think might be over the iPhone 12 hype already - and I haven't even bought one yet.

Been hovering over the buy button for a week to replace my 8. First I switched back to black because the blue just seemed a bit off for my tastes. Then I keep hearing the battery life is a bit worse than the 11, which is the exact reason I need an upgrade in the first place.

I just want a bigger screen and good battery life anyway.

so i recently bought a razer blade stealth (i7 8550u) for 650$ from ebay but am now really regretting it with the news of the new m1 chips..... anyone have any advice on how to go backwards from here? should i just be happy with my stealth?

The way Apple gear tends to develop, M1 buyers are probably going to regret not waiting for the M2. There's already chatter about migrating the Mac Pro over to Apple Silicon. Given how long it took them to move that line over to Intel they must have some big stuff in the pipeline.

I hear Razer laptops are pretty great. I'd say just be happy with that for a while and squirrel your pennies away for a generation or two.

For me the OS is also a consideration. I much prefer Windows to macOS.

should i just be happy with my stealth?

Considering at the very least you saved yourself $350-700, be happy with the Razor.
Probably got more RAM to boot...

Vargen wrote:

The way Apple gear tends to develop, M1 buyers are probably going to regret not waiting for the M2.

Yeah, never buy the first generation of a new Apple product. The second-gen is always a big improvement.

FiveIron wrote:

so i recently bought a razer blade stealth (i7 8550u) for 650$ from ebay but am now really regretting it with the news of the new m1 chips..... anyone have any advice on how to go backwards from here? should i just be happy with my stealth?

You can't run Windows or Linux on those, so you're probably permanently stuck with MacOS on that hardware. If the programs you want to run exist on that system, those look like dynamite little chips, and you'll probably be pretty happy with it. But if you're a gamer, then you'll probably be happier with a Windows machine, at least for now.

As others are saying, later variants are likely to be much more powerful. These will be in desktop form factor, so that might be a problem, but with the additional thermal headroom, are likely to have a lot more horsepower. If game devs start porting their stuff to MacOS (not very likely) then it could end up being really amazing. But Apple makes that hard, since they don't support Vulkan and insist that everyone use their Metal graphics system instead.

Also, Macs are rarely expandable anymore, which can be a significant problem. If you want a bigger drive, or more RAM, or a better video card, too bad. Buy a new Mac.

Mac doesn’t support installing windows anymore on their machines? How long has that been the case?

Apple having the best anything performance related still isn’t making sense to me. How long until someone comes out with something equivalent?

FiveIron wrote:

Mac doesn’t support installing windows anymore on their machines? How long has that been the case?

This processor architecture change.

Standard Windows doesn't support ARM, and the ARM version of Win10 is only licensed to OEMs, so there's no real incentive for Apple to support something people can't legally get.

I saw an interview with some of Apple's engineers recently where they were asked about the possibility of Windows on M1 Macs, and they said something along the lines of "We've made all the tools available, it's in Microsoft's court now". So if Microsoft releases a version of ARM Windows to the general public, it sounds like Apple won't put any obstacles in its way.

Ah that’s encouraging.

If there is an arm windows, does that also mean every program needs to be re-written for arm as well inside of windows?

Also, I understand that m1 is like a mobile chip that’s now being used in a full computer, what about like android snapdragon or whatever the heck that is?

FiveIron wrote:

Ah that’s encouraging.

If there is an arm windows, does that also mean every program needs to be re-written for arm as well inside of windows?

Also, I understand that m1 is like a mobile chip that’s now being used in a full computer, what about like android snapdragon or whatever the heck that is?

Less re-written and more re-compiled. Mostly.

Windows 10 on Arm devices were initially marketed as "Windows on Snapdragon (WoS)", but I think 1) consumers don't actually care about the Snapdragon brand since there's no scenario where they buy a Snapdragon processor on its own and 2) Qualcomm Snapdragon processors have always lagged behind Apple's original designs in terms of performance and power consumption. Someone cobbled together a way to run Windows on ARM on an M1 unofficially, and even with all of the caveats involved it outperformed the updated Surface Pro X--to date the fastest Windows on ARM device--by at least 50% on single core measurements.

In any case, don't buy hardware based on software that might come out in the future for it.

FiveIron wrote:

Mac doesn’t support installing windows anymore on their machines? How long has that been the case?

Apple having the best anything performance related still isn’t making sense to me. How long until someone comes out with something equivalent?

Because Windows currently runs on the x86 architecture. It doesn't have to, there have been ports to other chips, but at the moment, the only version you can buy requires x86 hardware. The M1 is not x86.... it's ARM, a super hopped-up version of the chip in your phone. It's incredibly quick, but wholly alien to the current versions of Windows.

Right now, the only OS that will run on this hardware is MacOS, period. And Apple is famously cagey about releasing documentation if they don't have to, and their friendliness to open source is very limited. (they liked it when they needed it to get OS X up in a reasonable period of time, and needed the pieces of a functional OS without having to write them in-house, but once they were past the crunch, their support of it dropped off very sharply.)

So, a Linux port doesn't look very likely. If it did run, it would be probably be in a crippled mode, because it's unlikely that the Linux devs would ever get the documentation they'd need.

Windows might run, but it would need to be an ARM port. The existing software library wouldn't run directly. Microsoft could potentially do an x86-to-ARM recompilation system, like Apple is doing, but it would be much harder on the Windows platform because there's so much more to support. Apple jettisoned all 32-bit support a couple years ago, so they don't have to deal with any of that complexity in their translation engine, where Microsoft will definitely have to.

Windows apps could be ported to ARM easily enough, but Microsoft would have to release updated compilers that generated ARM code. The freeware MinGW, which is the Windows port of the GCC compiler, can't even generate 64-bit binaries on Windows, so expecting them to support ARM anytime in the near future is probably foolish.

Thus, existing binaries would run, but slowly. New binaries could take advantage of the M1, but the general public won't be generating those without updating to the very most recent toolkits. I'm not sure if the free version of Visual Studio will even produce ARM code, that could potentially be reserved for paying customers.

Upshot: if you buy an M1, assume you can only ever run MacOS on it. That way, you can't be disappointed. If Windows or Linux comes out for that hardware, expect a suboptimal experience, possibly for years.

Parallels seem pretty confident about Windows performance on their VM. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. As for the next refresh, I’d say it depends on what model you want to buy. They’ve only been refreshing the Mac Mini once every 3 years so you could be waiting a while there.

Was there ever an explanation of why the iOS Alarm app doesn’t play through Bluetooth speakers? Super annoying. I would have assumed it’s a bug but it would surely have been fixed by now so I suppose it’s working as intended.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Parallels seem pretty confident about Windows performance on their VM. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. As for the next refresh, I’d say it depends on what model you want to buy. They’ve only been refreshing the Mac Mini once every 3 years so you could be waiting a while there.

In my experience, Parallels is more about marketing than technical achievement. Of course they sound confident, because that's what that company does.

Actually running Windows code without crashing and at a reasonable speed, however, is an entirely different thing.

I’ve played Windows Steam games on Parallels. Plus the Rosetta 2 performance numbers seem pretty amazing. Better to wait and see rather than assume anything.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

I’ve played Windows Steam games on Parallels. Plus the Rosetta 2 performance numbers seem pretty amazing. Better to wait and see rather than assume anything.

Well, I'll take the position, up front, that Parallels on the M1 will be extremely troublesome and crash-prone, probably for years. If VMWare comes out with something, that will probably be reliable, but likely not as fast.

That's a prediction based on past experience, aka a wild-assed extrapolation from minimal evidence.

As I understand it, Rosetta 2 works as well as it does because of specific features that Apple designed into the M1 to accommodate it. It won't work on just any ARM-based chip. I'm not sure what that might mean for Microsoft's ARM efforts; presumably they're interested in supporting more than just Apple's ARM hardware. Those x86 features might very well help the Parallels people get retail Windows working though.

Malor wrote:

Windows might run, but it would need to be an ARM port. The existing software library wouldn't run directly. Microsoft could potentially do an x86-to-ARM recompilation system, like Apple is doing, but it would be much harder on the Windows platform because there's so much more to support. Apple jettisoned all 32-bit support a couple years ago, so they don't have to deal with any of that complexity in their translation engine, where Microsoft will definitely have to.

Windows apps could be ported to ARM easily enough, but Microsoft would have to release updated compilers that generated ARM code. The freeware MinGW, which is the Windows port of the GCC compiler, can't even generate 64-bit binaries on Windows, so expecting them to support ARM anytime in the near future is probably foolish.

Microsoft has done all of that. Windows 10 has been ported to 64-bit ARM. While it's not a recompilation system like Rosetta 2, there's emulation for Windows x86 binaries, and support for x86-64 binaries just hit the bleeding edge Dev channel of the O.S. They had the ability to generate ARM output from their compilers targeting Windows 10 well over a year ago. The available hardware's just not compelling enough in sales, performance, or battery life for the ISVs to make much effort for it.

So I might be in the market for a new laptop sooner than anticipated.... any leaks about m2?

Otherwise, are intel and AMD chips still a better choice than m1 macs? Like, if I want to spend 1k, what’s the best laptop for productivity that might have the same build quality, speed, battery life, potentially some light gaming, as the m1 if not the m1 itself?

FiveIron wrote:

So I might be in the market for a new laptop sooner than anticipated.... any leaks about m2?

Otherwise, are intel and AMD chips still a better choice than m1 macs? Like, if I want to spend 1k, what’s the best laptop for productivity that might have the same build quality, speed, battery life, potentially some light gaming, as the m1 if not the m1 itself?

Everyone who has tested the new M1 Macs has been raving about them. As far as I can tell, there seem to be plenty of upsides to M1 (performance, heat (lack of), battery life, etc) and no downsides apart from the occasional software compatibility issue. If I was looking for a new laptop today, was happy with a lower end spec (by Apple standards), and couldn't (or didn't want to) wait for the next generation, honestly I wouldn't even bother looking at anything with an Intel CPU.

If there are any particular apps you need to keep running, this site will tell you whether they're compatible with M1 yet (mostly yes).

I'd wait for the new zen 3 apu based laptops are available. Provided you can get them.
The new AMD U series will supposedly have 17+ hours of battery life and improved Zen 3 performance over my Zen 2 4500U which is plenty powerful.

fangblackbone wrote:

I'd wait for the new zen 3 apu based laptops are available. Provided you can get them.
The new AMD U series will supposedly have 17+ hours of battery life and improved Zen 3 performance over my Zen 2 4500U which is plenty powerful.

That sounds like a good choice for a Windows laptop, but since this is the Apple OS thread, I was assuming FiveIron was specifically looking for a Mac laptop. (5I, can you clarify this?)

I listen to the Accidental Tech podcast with Marco Arment. He and the other hosts are hardcore Apple users and developers and have been raving about the M1 Macbook Air for weeks. They say its the fastest system available right now and is the perfect package - small fanless form factor and no touch bar.

There may not be an immediate rev of the M1 itself anytime soon, but immediate future hardware upgrades are rumored to be in the form of additional ports and maybe bringing back MagSafe.

It sounds like you can’t go wrong with any of the M1 systems. There’s no way I’d buy an Intel based Mac.

CaptainCrowbar wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

I'd wait for the new zen 3 apu based laptops are available. Provided you can get them.
The new AMD U series will supposedly have 17+ hours of battery life and improved Zen 3 performance over my Zen 2 4500U which is plenty powerful.

That sounds like a good choice for a Windows laptop, but since this is the Apple OS thread, I was assuming FiveIron was specifically looking for a Mac laptop. (5I, can you clarify this?)

yes, i actually do prefer a windows. I have never used a mac as my primary computer before so switching makes me nervous.

However, I can't think of another laptop right now that is of the same quality and performance as the m1 mac air. The ryzen cpus are promising a lot, but I haven't seen it yet. for that reason I'm willing to switch.

If you're a gamer or you need to run specific Windows-only software, M1 laptops will probably not make you happy. For general-purpose use, you're likely to get along just fine. The M1 is very fast and very power efficient, so you should get both excellent performance and battery life.

If you know it can run the software you want, it's a great choice.

Yes, if all you want to do is stuff on the internet and light content creation, the M1 is awesome. If you want to play games, you still want a Windows machine with a graphics card.

I’m tempted by the M1 machines, but I’m worried about how well it will be supported for development. If I didn’t have that concern, however, and just needed a general purpose computer I would grab one in a heartbeat.