I want to tell you about my M1 Macbook Pro

Post Reply New Topic

I am bit of a computer nerd and have more computers than I can possibly use. I still have a 2010 iMac, 2015 12 in MacBook Pro with the m5 (I like how tiny it is), and my prior main Mac was a 15 in 2014 MacBook Pro with an i7.

Oh, and I have a Windows gaming desktop, and two Windows gaming laptops. I have two gaming laptops because I thought the first one broke for the third time (first two were warranty repairs) so I bought a better one. Turns out, the battery connection was loose and I just needed to take it out and put it back in.

Anyways, so I have 6 computers, not including my work laptops (I have two of those at the moment, but will have 1 in a few weeks, we were transitioning).

Then I bought the M1 MacBook, making it 7 personal computers, so when I say this - know that it comes from someone that uses a lot laptops.

Its the best laptop, ever.

I hesitated to downgrade the screen size to 14 in, but after an initial period of regret I now look at my older 15 in Macbook as "clunky" and oversized. The screen quality on the M1 MacBook is something that you have to see. I look at it and when I go to my Alienware gaming laptop, I instantly notice that the Alienware has weak colors. The colors on this laptop really seem... colorful... I can't explain it.

The battery life is amazing and the laptop never gets warm. I need to charge it 2 times a week, but I am using it more so that will change.

Downside: obviously there is the new platform with the M1 so a lot of software doesn't work. However, in terms of a laptop that you can actually use as a portable laptop - this is the best ever.

I have a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro with 2.7GHz Intel i5 and 8 GB of RAM and a 121 GB SSD. I bought when I thought I wanted something minimal to write my resume on. I now wish it had a much bigger SSD or even a internal HD or external HD. I'd like more room for some VMs and XCode.

Sometimes I go to Apple's web site and look at the new MacBooks - then I pick one out - then I change the specs - then I look at the now $8000 price tag and decide to keep my 2015 MacBook Pro a bit longer.

Most of the software I want I can get with "brew". I spend most of my time in iTerm2, but I also have LibreOffice and Chrome and Gimp and Inkscape and VLC (for music). For me it is like a Linux box with a better look and feel, and not so much fiddling to get the graphics card working.

Sometimes I think of getting a cheap Windows laptop and run a "Hackintosh" in a VM (or QEMU). And maybe Ubuntu on a VM or WSL. I used to run Cygwin on my Work Windows Laptop. I would like to dual boot it to Ubuntu when I wanted to really run Linux.

I spend too much time shopping and looking at specs and never seem to buy. Analysis Paralysis.

The M1 Chip is supposed to be a great chip

https://proandroiddev.com/apple-m1-vs-i ... a2f0d197dc

I used to be all Linux, but now we are all Apple.

My computer is a potato.

If you plug a zinc plate in one side and a copper plate in the other you can use your potato computer to power a digital clock.

The computer in Foxtrot (newspaper cartoon) looks like a peach with a stem and all.

One radio show I listen talked about a cool new cell phone which was an "appleberry"!

I want to get new Raspberry Pi - actually.

New M1/M2 stuff looks interesting although I'd only use linux on it, don't like macos spying on data and also being unable to run 32bit software like you used to be able to do.

^ Actually it can run 32-bit apps, and intel apps - google QEMU and M1

I've got no experience of Macbooks or any Apple Mac systems whatsoever, but over the last two or three years I've viewed the whole phenomenon with a kind of appalled fascination as I've looked at second hand Macbooks for sale at £2000-£2500 and wondered what on earth the whole thing was about. The sort of machine I'm referring to doesn't seem to be capable of doing much more, if anything at all, than my secondhand eight year old £200 Windows laptop, lol.

I have seen a few secondhand Macbooks at around the £500 mark, and have wondered out of curiosity whether they'd be worth taking a punt on, but I'm assuming that their version of the operating system is obsolete or close to becoming so.

I've heard that it's possible to run a Mac OS in Windows, a so-called 'Hackintosh' system. That sounds more like it - must look into that!

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1 ... benchmark/

Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark
Sunday November 15, 2020 1:30 pm PST by Frank McShan
The first native benchmarks of Apple's M1 chip appeared on the Geekbench site last week showing impressive native performance. Today, new benchmarks have begun showing up for the M1 chip emulating x86 under Rosetta 2.

The new Rosetta 2 Geekbench results uploaded show that the ‌M1‌ chip running on a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM has single-core and multi-core scores of 1,313 and 5,888 respectively. Since this version of Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, an impact on performance is to be expected. Rosetta 2 running x86 code appears to be achieving 78%-79% of the performance of native Apple Silicon code.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questio ... tta-2-work

Rosetta 2 works by doing an ahead-of-time (AOT) translation of the Intel code to corresponding ARM code. It is able to do this efficiently and easily mainly because the M1 CPU contains a special instruction that switches the memory-ordering model observed by the CPU for that thread into a model equivalent to the Intel x86 model (TSO - total store order). This has to do with how programs can expect memory consistency to work when having multiple processors (i.e. cores in this case).

User's can observe the translation the first time they launch an Intel app on the M1 as the first launch is slow. The translated code is cached and used on subsequent, much faster launches.

If you have a binary that is valid for several different architectures, you can specifically invoke Rosetta 2 by specifying that you want to launch the Intel code. You can do that from the terminal like this:

arch -x86_64 ./mycommand
Note that this setting also applies to any program that the "mycommand" process should choose to run.

Rosetta 2 as delivered by Apple in macOS Big Sur is not setup to dynamically invoke translation for a portion of x86 instructions. It is entirely focused on doing an AOT translation of the whole binary in advance. There's no user interface for translating a few small set of instructions on the fly. Rosetta 2 does include a JIT engine that allows translating instructions on the fly (for example if you run an Intel-based browser with a JIT JavaScript engine) - it is however not a general purpose JIT-engine that you could use for other purposes through an API or similar.

If you want to do that for research purposes or just out of "pure interest", then you could just take the instructions you want to translate and add them to a simple application shell (essentially adding them to a simple main()-only C program for example) and run it. The cached, translated version of the program then includes the translated instructions for inspection.

The cache is available in these folders:

/var/db/oah/
/System/Library/dyld/aot_shared_cache
There's no immediate way of "bridging" Rosetta 2 to QEMU to allow fast virtualization of Intel Docker images. QEMU contains its own Intel x86 emulation, so you could get it to run Intel Docker images on the M1 without involving Rosetta 2 at all. In this case, "fast" is a very subjective measure.