Poll: *** The official 2020 MacBook Air/13" MacBook Pro thread (it has the M1 chip and everything!) ***

What 2020 Apple Silicon notebook have you ordered?

  • MacBook Air

    Votes: 71 71.0%
  • 13" MacBook Pro

    Votes: 29 29.0%

  • Total voters
    100
Soldato
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So, World of Warcraft's latest patch has it running native on M1. I'm really interested to see the performance as I'm considering a new MacBook soon.
Can someone with one of the new Macs run it and see how it is?

I'll run it when I get mine, but mines the 16GB version so potentially not until the 25th. I hope they include Classic as native on M1 but I think that's running on the Legion client still.
 
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16E5RiO.jpg

Base spec Air has arrived :) can confirm very snappy setup and extremely quick on web browsing. Going to update to 11.01 now for a bit of extra performance.
 
Soldato
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16E5RiO.jpg

Base spec Air has arrived :) can confirm very snappy setup and extremely quick on web browsing. Going to update to 11.01 now for a bit of extra performance.

Congrats! If you can manage, run a Cinebench R23 through Rosetta after the 11.0.1 update.
 
Don
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Trying to decide which version to get if the performance reports are good.
I do a lot of CAD so am thinking 16GB is kind of a must. Thinking I will probably go Pro with 16GB and 512GB SSD.
 
Soldato
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Trying to decide which version to get if the performance reports are good.
I do a lot of CAD so am thinking 16GB is kind of a must. Thinking I will probably go Pro with 16GB and 512GB SSD.

That's also the spec I'd have gone for if I were to buy these.
 
Associate
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16E5RiO.jpg

Base spec Air has arrived :) can confirm very snappy setup and extremely quick on web browsing. Going to update to 11.01 now for a bit of extra performance.

I think mine is turning up just after midday, was hoping to give it a spin on a Zoom call but not sure there will be enough time to set it up.... I have to deal with a lot of fan noise plus lag on my current setup when I zoom+share my screen etc so can't wait.
 
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I dont know whether it means anything but whenever I used to update my 16" MBP it always used to say 25 minutes remaining at the start, this one is 11 minutes.
 
Soldato
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Amazing. How on earth people are trying to downplay what is being done with the M1 chip here is beyond me. 'Pfft, thats not impressive its nowhere near as powerful as a my 12 core CPU!!"

A lot of the downplayers have focused on the whole "world's fastest core" claim that Apple made, and that it doesn't reach the ~1600 single-core score that Ryzen 5000 chips get in Cinebench R23, missing the entire point of it.

The point is, for the first time in literally decades, we have a new major player in the consumer laptop/desktop CPU industry that is competitive with Intel and AMD, and manages to do that at significantly lower levels of power consumption. Yeah, it doesn't top every single benchmark out there at single-core performance, and obviously doesn't beat 8 or 12 or 16 core variants of Intel and AMD at multi-core benchmarks, duh.

Even if you hate Apple and all their products, this is great because it's going to push Intel, AMD and will also push ARM into the consumer laptop/desktop market, again increasing competition. But a lot of people have taken this as a personal attack against their precious PCs and their x86 dreams :D

At first it was "Geekbench isn't a real benchmark", despite the fact that the workloads during the test is very good and measures a lot of the important things, or more intelligent versions of it "Geekbench is too quick and doesn't measure sustained performance", which is a fair point. Then came SPEC, and suddenly the benchmark used by almost every computer architecture paper and industry-standard benchmark for servers turned into an "Apple benchmark" and again, not a "good benchmark", which was asinine, and now that Cinebench is out and we see it's both competitive and can sustain performance as good as any other chip out there, the focus has turned to the fact that it might be 5% slower than the best scores from huge chips that can use up to 25w per core during boosting, lol.

Apple for some reason just brings the worst out of some people, fanboys or haters alike. Fanboys never admit or accept that there are very legitimate reasons to not like Apple products, and haters can never admit that there's something good about them too and they can be awesome products for a lot of people.
 
Soldato
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Seems to be a bug in r23 as Multi core finishes at 6565pts but single core never finishes.

Since the tiles are not equal, it can't stop in the middle of a run (or else the result won't be accurate). You'll have to wait until that run is over.
 
Soldato
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I keep saying in the AMD VS Intel threads that ARM is a far bigger strategic threat to both AMD and Intel than they are to each other. Often falls on deaf ears though, some people just don’t get that ARM will cover most of the consumer market with ease at a much lower power requirement. Recompiling programs is far easier these days than it was in the past.

My only gripe with the M1 is with Apples marketing materials which were so vague and obscure it made them look like they were doing a Kickstarter pitch.

The product itself is very much on my radar and looks great. I need to replace my SP3 and I can’t decide between the air and a refreshed iPad Pro probably due early next year.
 
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