I’m certainly not an apple fan, but it this chip means apple will be able to make laptops that don’t over heat that will be cool. At my first job I did everything on apple II computers, but we had to take the top off and aim fans inside to keep them from crashing. I think their thermals have gotten worse since them. this could help.
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Hmm… yeah, about that:
The MacBook Air: “thinnest, lightest notebook, … And a silent, fanless design”. Which probably means it will be even worse than before, at running something sustained on the CPU, like Rack. So the new silicon might be very powerful, but you’ll only be able to actually use that power in short bursts on this machine, before it completely thermally throttles. But it can run iPad apps…
We’ll see how the graphics and cooling on the Pro and Mini models stack up, when the tech reviews are in. If the cooling is improved and the graphics is much better, the Mini might actually be an attractive device. Oh, and someone needs to check whether OpenGL even runs on Big Sur now.
On the presentation website, there is a part where they say the new Macs make great machines for Music creation or playing games, so i guess they hope to be able to use the power of the chips in more than small bursts, but we’ll see how it goes 
- There is ZERO information about signed VST/AU plugins or any requirement for them to be on the app store.
- Also wrong here. You can target ARM on x86. Of course you should have a machine to test it. So what? it is 700 dollars.
Most people in this thread don’t understand how x86 chips are old and bloated technology. EVERYONE will move to ARM. From Apple, to Windows, to cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Azure). Apple is leading but Microsoft released just last week the x86-64 to ARM emulator to enable traditional windows apps to run on ARM, Amazon has released ARM Graviton2 (40% better performance from comparable x86-based instances for 20% less energy). Google is creating an in-house ARM processor (for the Pixel phone) and its pressuring intel on the cloud with, i’m quoting: “we are looking forward to try ARM on the cloud”. Microsoft Azure has deployed ARM Marvell’s ThunderX2 for internal workloads and it’s working with Qualcomm to bring ARM to the public offerings.
Apple just happens to be the most experienced company on the planet designing ARM chips. M1 is only 20% slower on single thread performance than the best performance CPU (Ryzen 9 5900X 4700) on the market. So you can hate, but you can’t ignore the fabulous work Apple has done here.
There will be some initial pains for developers regarding virtualisation (Docker support is months away), but everything else it’s just easy with today compilers. The world will move on.
@hexdump You are right here, the biggest improvements we will have are in regarding multi-tasking/parallel work capabilities but mainly performance/energy efficiency ratio. That’s why the world will see a transition from general CPU-only instruction set to acceleration cores, like some of the ones on Apple M1 and just like UAD have done with their ultra-outdated but still performant and useful plugin platform (just imagine the processing power of UAD if they have followed the kinds of hardware improvements apple did with the A-series chips). You will have specific hardware for different kinds of workloads. Here, Apple will take advantage of this and develop proprietary APIs to protect themselves, making the life of developer effectively harder. But I think in the end companies/developers will not be able to ignore Apple, given the large base of users that value the ecosystem refined and polished experience, even for professional setups. btw, a lot of developers LOVE apple and working for/with apple ecosystem
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Let me be more clear. I don’t think Apple is suddenly going to stop putting form over function. But it’s just a fact that the ARM mips/power is much better than Intel Core CPUs. So even if they don’t do anything about the thermals it should be a big win just because of that. Pure speculation, of course.
Now in a moment I turn on my work macbook pro and wait for the fans to come on full whenever it compiles something…
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I ordered a Mac mini for next Week… I couldn’t resist at such low prices 
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you can attach ONLY 2 monitors…
seems to be the defect of these M1s
HEY, but I use one monitor… .
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I use one monitor but if I could get 2 it might prod me back into doing more streaming. Not that I’d use a mac.
I’m very interested to hear about your experience with audio applications , especially VCV Rack. And the device noise, versus performance etc.
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Just grab out an old 14" CRT… with an adapter from VGA to Thunderbold this should work 
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Well, that would not be easy. Despite having Rosetta 2, which can translate x86_64 binaries to the arm architecture to run software which was compiled for Intel Mac’s, the problem is that this technology do not support SIMD (AVX, AVX2 etc.), which are used in code to speedup things on polyphony for example.
The only way would be to remove those sections, where Intel SIMD was used, and replace it with straight code and then recompile to target native arm architecture… At least this will be what I’ll try with the new MacMini to see how it’s performing… we will see
…and run the current version with all the plugins out there will not be possible I guess.
That severely reduces CPU performance doesn’t it? Although that’s just based on previous x86 emulation technologies, I don’t really now about this incarnation
All the Fundamentals use simd.
in case anyone wants to play around with macos arm builds of vcvrack, it might be worth to have a look at my linux arm builds which i’m doing for more than a year now - https://github.com/hexdump0815/vcvrack-dockerbuild-v1 - there are quite a few patches for some of the modules required for arm (at least on linux) and for simd you can use the simde headers to translate sse & co to arm neon where possible or at least to get some ok performing alternatives …
good luck and best wishes - hexdump
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It seems Rosetta 2 may be very impressive in this regard:
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That is true, but all plugins depend on a Rack host and that will not be running through Rosetta 2 - unfortunately. And recompiled Rack binaries will not be compatible to the current plugins out there.
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Ahh, perfect, that was something I hoped to find! Thanks!
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Yes, Apple praises a very good performance using Rosetta 2, but we will see what people will report after examining real machines populated with M1… At leased things will be faster compared to my old 2013 MacBook with it‘s 2.0 GHz Haswell i7.
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