Microsoft and Apple rivalry heats up

If there's anything I do like about Apple's stuff, it's the ecosystem. I don't mean stuff like the Watch and iCloud. The integration of their hardware right down to the Bluetooth profiles customised for higher-res audio from the microphone is way ahead of what anyone else is doing for now, with exception to Samsung, Huawei, and Microsoft (but all three are behind).

I wish Bluetooth worked better. I wish Your Phone wasn't such a piece of trash occasionally when it chooses to not sync. A Hand-Off kind of mode would be nice, and I've only had that sort of thing with GSConnect/KDE Connect on Linux.

Even stuff like Timeline, which was quite nifty, has been ****-canned by Microsoft because they can't get it to work all the time. I prefer the way Microsoft handles a bunch of things on their ecosystem, but it's annoying when they keep changing what they want Windows to be.

And then there's the fact that Windows doesn't have an ecosystem of its own. The Microsoft Band? Gone. Windows Phone? Gone. Windows File History (as a Time Machine alternative)? Broken.

I must piecemeal something together to approximate what Apple offers and it's not always good.
 
|tera| said:
To you.
Do the math. See for yourself how overpriced Apple is.
Click to expand...
What are you talking about?

The base model MacBook Air is arguably the best value of any laptop.

- R18k at most stores currently, incl. iStore
- Insanely fast M1 chip
- Colour-accurate, high-res display
- Good webcam
- Amazing mic and speakers
- Godlike battery life, ±15 hours if you use Safari
- Looks great, thin metal body
- Nice keyboard
- Dead silent passive cooling, never gets hot

What Windows options compete with that?
 
ponder said:
Is that an issue related to the cpu though?
Click to expand...
For the pointer freezing issue, I'm not sure, but it happened on both of them. The excessive disk use was due to the excessively small amount of RAM, so it writes loads of data to the SSD. Tried doing some 4k drone footage editing and it crawls. You can't do anything useful in Parallels as there isn't enough RAM and that's one of the biggest complaints in our office since they switched most of us to Apple. Even those with the 16GB versions are struggling. You can't get more than 16GB as that's the max memory limit of the M1 and hence why the pros in our office won't touch it.

But yay for the battery life...
 
Norrad said:
For the pointer freezing issue, I'm not sure, but it happened on both of them. The excessive disk use was due to the excessively small amount of RAM, so it writes loads of data to the SSD. Tried doing some 4k drone footage editing and it crawls. You can't do anything useful in Parallels as there isn't enough RAM and that's one of the biggest complaints in our office since they switched most of us to Apple. Even those with the 16GB versions are struggling. You can't get more than 16GB as that's the max memory limit of the M1 and hence why the pros in our office won't touch it.

But yay for the battery life...
Click to expand...

I regularly edit 4k footage from my A73 and I've never had so much as a hiccup. What video editing software are you using? The SSD write usage is interesting, but unconfirmed. Some articles suggested it was software related as the 16GB versions had the same issue.

If we can trust the reporting tools (that all give different results anyway) I've written around 9TB (18,028,498 [9.23 TB]) in nearly 3 months of daily usage (Outlook, MS Teams, Azure Data Studio, VSCode, Excel, Firefox, Safari & Remote desktop are my most used tools). Many 256GB SSDs are rated 150TBW but more likely will reach 300+. So at the current rate I should be fine for what...8 years? But we don't know the specifics of the SSDs in the new M1, so it's hard to draw any conclusion.

With regards to Parallels, yea I can see how that can be an issue. There are a number of people of YT that tested this since the M1 support from Parallels with success, however most of them just tested games, so not very useful I suppose. And you are limited to using the insider edition of W if I'm not mistaken.

My own experience with M1 has been pretty good overall, my issues seem mostly related to BigSur and not to the actual hardware
 
|tera| said:
Doesn't really matter.
Any beefy laptop with Windows competes perfectly fine. Would be cheaper to buy too.
Click to expand...

Actually that’s the whole problem, since the M1 this isn’t really true any more.

The “beefy” all leans to the M1 while being ridiculously low on power use and having an all day battery life without any fan noise either.

They are also cheaper when it comes to like to like comparisons.

Yea you can get cheaper laptops, but not ones of the same class overall.

I’m sorry but your posts are a little transparent with your hard lean to all things Windows and not actually having any real Apple experience and therefore will be mostly disregarded as a lot of it is simply false.
 
prOd said:
I regularly edit 4k footage from my A73 and I've never had so much as a hiccup. What video editing software are you using?
Click to expand...
I used Adobe Premiere Pro. Tried it first when it still only supported Rosetta 2 and then the latest version which supports the M1, but it still exports the files at a snail's pace. 1080p flies though, but that's to be expected.
 
Norrad said:
For the pointer freezing issue, I'm not sure, but it happened on both of them. The excessive disk use was due to the excessively small amount of RAM, so it writes loads of data to the SSD. Tried doing some 4k drone footage editing and it crawls. You can't do anything useful in Parallels as there isn't enough RAM and that's one of the biggest complaints in our office since they switched most of us to Apple. Even those with the 16GB versions are struggling. You can't get more than 16GB as that's the max memory limit of the M1 and hence why the pros in our office won't touch it.

But yay for the battery life...
Click to expand...

Wouldn’t the Parallels problem be that everything is running in emulation as there isn’t any ARM-compatible stuff available?

That being said yea if you need to run parallels you are either doing it wrong from a software perspective, or if it’s truly impossible then they provided the wrong hardware for the job.

With 500 odd MacBooks most of which are being switched to M1 Pros we have none of these problems and actually started a project to get rid of our lower end Chromebook machine and replace those with M1A’s as they’ll cost us less overall, in time and license costs and effort etc.
 
Norrad said:
I used Adobe Premiere Pro. Tried it first when it still only supported Rosetta 2 and then the latest version which supports the M1, but it still exports the files at a snail's pace. 1080p flies though, but that's to be expected.
Click to expand...

Won’t you agree that this sounds more like a software problem potentially and we are in the honeymoon conversion period where they must all find their feet?

That being said the M1A wasn’t really intended for this kind of work and I wonder why you wouldn’t have gotten a Pro instead?

It will throttle this workload for lack of active cooling.
 
|tera| said:
Doesn't really matter.
Any beefy laptop with Windows competes perfectly fine. Would be cheaper to buy too.
Click to expand...
Up until the M1 that was probably true but no longer imho especially considering what you get these days for sub-R20k in Windows laptops. I struggle to find a reason why the average Joe requires anything more than a 256GB Macbook Air M1 for R18,000.
 
BraBean said:
Why is it a game changer?
Click to expand...
Performance matters. Intel was complacent slowly incrementing processor speed turning as much profit as they can. Now suddenly the standard chip Apple's M1 uses in all its laptop easily beats the bets intel core i9 chip. That shakes it up
 
Bryn said:
What are you talking about?

The base model MacBook Air is arguably the best value of any laptop.

- R18k at most stores currently, incl. iStore
- Insanely fast M1 chip
- Colour-accurate, high-res display
- Good webcam
- Amazing mic and speakers
- Godlike battery life, ±15 hours if you use Safari
- Looks great, thin metal body
- Nice keyboard
- Dead silent passive cooling, never gets hot

What Windows options compete with that?
Click to expand...
SauRoNZA said:
Actually that’s the whole problem, since the M1 this isn’t really true any more.

The “beefy” all leans to the M1 while being ridiculously low on power use and having an all day battery life without any fan noise either.

They are also cheaper when it comes to like to like comparisons.

Yea you can get cheaper laptops, but not ones of the same class overall.

I’m sorry but your posts are a little transparent with your hard lean to all things Windows and not actually having any real Apple experience and therefore will be mostly disregarded as a lot of it is simply false.
Click to expand...
Yep. I am pro-Windows.
I grew up with it. I work professionally in ICT with it, from Desktop/Laptop and Server OS level. I know it well inside and out. I prefer it and I am transparently leaning towards it.

I gave a few reasons why Apple is not for me. Not just a MBA, all of their devices.
Whether my opinion is regarded or disregarded doesn't really matter.

Here's an article that puts things unbiased into context. The Apple fans would like the results of the article. The Microsoft fans too.

www.laptopmag.com

Apple M1 vs. Intel CPU: This is the best processor for your laptop

Apple M1 vs Intel CPU — let the battle begin!
www.laptopmag.com www.laptopmag.com
 
|tera| said:
www.laptopmag.com

Apple M1 vs. Intel CPU: This is the best processor for your laptop

Apple M1 vs Intel CPU — let the battle begin!
www.laptopmag.com www.laptopmag.com
Click to expand...
From your artcile
If we look at raw speeds, it's no contest. We use Geekbench 5 as our flagpole for overall system performance. Even when running the benchmark through an emulator, the MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM scored a 5,962, topping the latest XPS 13 (5,319) with 11th Gen chips. Even Lenovo's Yoga 9i, which uses the most powerful 11th Gen Intel chips for ultraportable laptops, fell short of the MacBook Air with a score of 5,312.

This translated into some compelling real-world advantages for the MacBook Air, which converted a 4K video to 1080p resolution in just 9 minutes and 15 seconds whereas the XPS 13, our top Windows 10 laptop, needed 18 minutes and 22 seconds and the Yoga 9i took 14 minutes and 24 seconds.

Would you suggest an XPS13 for video conversion over the Macbook Air to a vlogger?
 
BraBean said:
Why is it a game changer?
Click to expand...
So I did some digging, because I was curious to what the "game changing" thing is of the M1. The Apple fans I have around me, family and friends, each has a different thing to say, to what the game changing factor is. Some I found out in my research, don't have clue of how the hardware is put together. Like they're making some stuff up as they go.
It seems the game changer, according to Apple, is that this one chip, M1, is used on both mobile and desktop hardware, eg. tablets, laptops, desktop, phones, tv players etc. So not different chips for different hardware. Making that software is not only compatible to one device or cpu, or sum such. Doesn't sound so big deal to me.
 
Last edited:
|tera| said:
Yep. I am pro-Windows.
I grew up with it. I work professionally in ICT with it, from Desktop/Laptop and Server OS level. I know it well inside and out. I prefer it and I am transparently leaning towards it.

I gave a few reasons why Apple is not for me. Not just a MBA, all of their devices.
Whether my opinion is regarded or disregarded doesn't really matter.

Here's an article that puts things unbiased into context. The Apple fans would like the results of the article. The Microsoft fans too.

www.laptopmag.com

Apple M1 vs. Intel CPU: This is the best processor for your laptop

Apple M1 vs Intel CPU — let the battle begin!
www.laptopmag.com www.laptopmag.com
Click to expand...
Apple may not be for you, and I am on generally the same boat of being pro-Windows... But the M1 chip is a damn fine piece of engineering and those Apple machines are generally incredible.

As always though they don't cover all use cases so won't be the best for everything, but that even applies within the Windows/x86 space of laptops, you need to buy what works best for you specifically and Apple seem to have found a good sweet spot that is attractive to a lot of users and at a good price point as well.
 
Bryn said:
What are you talking about?

The base model MacBook Air is arguably the best value of any laptop.

- R18k at most stores currently, incl. iStore
- Insanely fast M1 chip
- Colour-accurate, high-res display
- Good webcam
- Amazing mic and speakers
- Godlike battery life, ±15 hours if you use Safari
- Looks great, thin metal body
- Nice keyboard
- Dead silent passive cooling, never gets hot

What Windows options compete with that?
Click to expand...
Can't you get something with a better gpu and upgradable RAM at 18k?
 
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