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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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.

I would get a Mac over an iPad, and I'm a heavy iPad user myself, but iPad OS is still not a true desktop OS at all.

As for Intel vs AMD vs ARM, I generally agree that ARM-based chips will become very competitive in future years, but Intel and AMD will adapt too, and in a lot of ways, AMD is already adapting. Every Zen generation has brought significant improvements in performance per watt over the last, and I expect the trend to continue.
 
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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.


Looks cracking that !

Very tempted to get one for my son for his homework he's using my 9/10 year old Dell XPS atm.

I assume standard apps work ok on the Air sure i read somewhere a lot struggling with the M1 chip? He does a lot of coding with Unity so want him to continue in that and he's learning HTML etc . But it seems like a lot of high school work now is done on the computer etc and submitted ( gone are the days doing in the bus the next morning lol )
 
Soldato
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Looks cracking that !

Very tempted to get one for my son for his homework he's using my 9/10 year old Dell XPS atm.

I assume standard apps work ok on the Air sure i read somewhere a lot struggling with the M1 chip? He does a lot of coding with Unity so want him to continue in that and he's learning HTML etc . But it seems like a lot of high school work now is done on the computer etc and submitted ( gone are the days doing in the bus the next morning lol )

Coding with Unity could be an issue now with M1 (at least for a while), I would double check that before buying one of these macs.
 
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Interesting - looks like an xCode Decompression on these beats an iMac Pro, which I'm not too worried about, but the fact that someone on /r/Apple has said that whilst the current iMac Pro fan is loud on it, the M1 device is completely silent. The lack of fan noise thus far is huge for me. I'm hoping that external display(s) on the Mini don't have fan noise.
 
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Setting mine up now! Buttery smooth, silent (obviously) and yes, can confirm it just gets gently warm.

Only thing now I need to figure out is how to get Google File Stream working on Big Sur. Seems to be a big issue.
 
Soldato
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I would get a Mac over an iPad, and I'm a heavy iPad user myself, but iPad OS is still not a true desktop OS at all.

As for Intel vs AMD vs ARM, I generally agree that ARM-based chips will become very competitive in future years, but Intel and AMD will adapt too, and in a lot of ways, AMD is already adapting. Every Zen generation has brought significant improvements in performance per watt over the last, and I expect the trend to continue.

For me it’s not quite as clear cut on the iPad vs MacBook. 99% of the SPs use these days is consumption and general browsing. The issue is that I quite like the touch screen and the full OS but I can’t get that on a Mac!

The iPad Pro and magic keyboard is more expensive.
 
Soldato
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Interesting - looks like an xCode Decompression on these beats an iMac Pro, which I'm not too worried about, but the fact that someone on /r/Apple has said that whilst the current iMac Pro fan is loud on it, the M1 device is completely silent. The lack of fan noise thus far is huge for me. I'm hoping that external display(s) on the Mini don't have fan noise.

A14 was as fast as Ryzen 5950X (per core) in Anandtech's 401.bzip2 SPEC benchmark. So I believe that user if they had the baseline 10-core iMac Pro (which are quite a bit slower per core than the 5950X).

For me it’s not quite as clear cut on the iPad vs MacBook. 99% of the SPs use these days is consumption and general browsing. The issue is that I quite like the touch screen and the full OS but I can’t get that on a Mac!

The iPad Pro and magic keyboard is more expensive.

I always say iPads are the ultimate web browsing machines, very convenient, touch, and Javascript performance is unbeatable. The new iPad Air would also be good if all you do is browsing and content consumption.
 

fez

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The battery life is always a bit of a funny one. I have the 16" MBP and I don't pay that much attention but I reckon that if I am doing anything particularly serious, I get maybe 2 hours of battery if I am lucky.
Interesting - looks like an xCode Decompression on these beats an iMac Pro, which I'm not too worried about, but the fact that someone on /r/Apple has said that whilst the current iMac Pro fan is loud on it, the M1 device is completely silent. The lack of fan noise thus far is huge for me. I'm hoping that external display(s) on the Mini don't have fan noise.

How many displays can the mac mini run because the new M1 macbooks can only run one as far as I know. That is basically a killer for me as I use dual 4k monitors for work.
 
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How many displays can the mac mini run because the new M1 macbooks can only run one as far as I know. That is basically a killer for me as I use dual 4k monitors for work.

Two displays - which was the biggest one for me, as whilst I mostly use a single display I generally have two connected for those times where having a second one is really useful. One 4k and one 1440p so going back to a tiny 13" screen isn't what I am looking to do at the moment

From the official tech specs:

  • One display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz connected via Thunderbolt and one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz connected via HDMI 2.0
 
Soldato
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How many displays can the mac mini run because the new M1 macbooks can only run one as far as I know. That is basically a killer for me as I use dual 4k monitors for work.

You'll be fine. M1 runs two displays, on laptops one is the integrated display and one external, or two external on Mac Mini. The only caveat is that one has to be HDMI and one usb-c or thunderbolt. So you can't do two HDMI or two thunderbolts.
 

fez

fez

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You'll be fine. M1 runs two displays, on laptops one is the integrated display and one external, or two external on Mac Mini. The only caveat is that one has to be HDMI and one usb-c or thunderbolt. So you can't do two HDMI or two thunderbolts.

Cool. Definitely something worth thinking about for people getting the laptops if they can only run one external. I assume that doesn't change if you work in clamshell either?

This is their first USB4 controller, I’m sure the number of displays will increase in following years.

Oh for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the big reasons they didn't put the M1 in anything more "pro" along with the lack of 32GB ram.
 
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TS7

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MBP was delivered this morning. Just taken it out of the box and completed the initial set up. So far, so good!

Question as a new Mac user; I'm getting the 'Updates Available - Do you want to install the updates now?' banner. Shall I update? (Asking as I know sometimes updates can be problematic and usually there's no going back!).
 
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Oh for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the big reasons they didn't put the M1 in anything more "pro" along with the lack of 32GB ram.

Lack of 32GB option is likely because of LPDDR4X availability right now (there were no reasonably-priced 16GB packages in the market until just now), not memory controller issues.

MBP was delivered this morning. Just taken it out of the box and completed the initial set up. So far, so good!

Question as a new Mac user; I'm getting the 'Updates Available - Do you want to install the updates now?' banner. Shall I update? (Asking as I know sometimes updates can be problematic and usually there's no going back!).

Update to the latest version, you'll get 100MHz extra on the CPU :D

Googling before updating is a good idea. It's very rare that Mac updates cause issues, I think Apple has only pulled updates once in the last few years (compared to several times a months for Windows) :D
 

Pez

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MBP was delivered this morning. Just taken it out of the box and completed the initial set up. So far, so good!

Question as a new Mac user; I'm getting the 'Updates Available - Do you want to install the updates now?' banner. Shall I update? (Asking as I know sometimes updates can be problematic and usually there's no going back!).

Go for it, shouldn't be an issue :)
 
Soldato
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MBP was delivered this morning. Just taken it out of the box and completed the initial set up. So far, so good!

Question as a new Mac user; I'm getting the 'Updates Available - Do you want to install the updates now?' banner. Shall I update? (Asking as I know sometimes updates can be problematic and usually there's no going back!).

Speaking as a true windows user.
Update and all will be ok and you'll never go back to windows again
 
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What is interesting is I have been using it for 20 minutes, installing things, browsing etc and battery is still 100%. On my previous MBP within seconds off power you were down to 99%.
 
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