Did anyone else read this as "Adobe Photoshop comes preloaded on Macs with Apple Silicon?" If I recall correctly, this was the case 15 (?) years back, I thought perhaps as a marketing gimmick, they were trying it again. Seems it would be a benefit to both of them - Apple can sell more hardware and Adobe can try to drive more people to purchase subscriptions with their app preloaded.
> If I recall correctly, this was the case 15 (?) years back
I recently installed Mac OS 9 on an emulator just to see what it was like. First thing I noticed was that there was a lot of third-party software that came with it both preinstalled and as extra on the installation CD. Heck, even iTunes used an installer made by a third party! That felt very un-Apple to me.
> even iTunes used an installer made by a third party! That felt very un-Apple to me.
Yes, everything installed differently, updated differently, and maintaining currency across a large application set was unreasonable without third party subscriptions like “Mac Update”! It was crazy.
And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store which was created as to assist users and devs with that problem.
> And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store which was created as to assist users and devs with that problem.
App Store is fine, as long as it's not the only way to the platform. If it's a curated catalog of apps + a hosting service + payment processing for those developers who want it, there's no problem with it existing. There is, however, a problem with how Apple keeps tightening its grip lately, and how current versions of macOS with default settings treat apps that haven't been vetted by Apple as if they're radioactive. That's still better than iOS, which outright refuses to run anything that isn't signed by Apple, but this overall direction is still troubling.
But then we’re immediately in the anti-consumer user anxiety inducing situation we were in before — where you don’t know where or how to keep these things up to date or secure or remember where that license key is or how to cancel the subscription or etc.
I deal with this with several dozen other tools on the Mac each using random store and key schemes. Lately I throw in the towel and switch to inferior tools in the app store if I can’t dig up the secret codes to the legacy hoops their devs want me to jump through. Charge me 30% more, no problem, just stop making me waste my time for things that are now solved problems.
This overall simplification and end-to-end trusted curation direction is a minority but well heeled part of the market (happy to spend money on apps if it doesn’t waste their time), and a sort of grand experiment in what users want. If users want a free for all, the majority of the market is still buying those handsets. If not, the option to have a handheld appliance should be available to those who want it.
Seems a shame to appeal to regulation to stomp on user choice where customers speak with their wallets that “please don’t make me think”.
The problem is the operating system developers, instead of defining a standard component that could pull update lists from anywhere, just decided, "we shall make one store, and we shall be the gatekeepers"
Imagine if windows (or MacOS) had a control panel where you could paste "Update subscription URLs", and uses crypto to verify licenses (optionally), and implemented binary diffs and what not, and provided a standard operating system component for navigating, purchasing, and installing/updating software?
They were SO CLOSE with add/remove Programs, and it never went all the way.
IIRC there is the Install-Package Powershell commandlet that might almost be that? But, I think it's still locked to Microsoft's store.
Take it a step further maybe. Why have the user set up updating at all? Suppose they've downloaded an app form the developer's website and installed it. When the app first runs, it calls a special API in the OS to register its "update feed" URL that provides the update info in a predefined format. The rest is then managed by the OS itself. It refetches these URLs as needed, shows notifications, installs updates, and, most importantly, provides the user with a central place somewhere in the settings to control all this.
I don't know much about the money/license part UX because I've never paid for software myself. But developers probably won't want to delegate licensing to the OS because this would make it all too easy to crack — it would only take one very simple patch to disable license checks altogether system-wide.
edit: Sparkle already uses a standardized feed format (https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/publishing/). So basically the only thing that's left is to move the update checking and installation logic to the OS as opposed to every app containing a copy of it.
This is a much better idea than the parent. It would be great if MacOS included a default package manager and apps registered themselves like this. My only concern would be malware taking advantage of this and somehow figuring out how to persistently register itself. I'm sure there's a fix but I haven't quickly come to a solution in the 10 seconds that I've thought about it.
I absolutely would have expected that the API exists to do this w/o human intervention. And given Windows, A way to do it via Group Policy & Active Directory.
I'm a strong believer, however, in making sure the user has visibility and control into it, so both methods (manually add/remote/check status & API) ought to be available.
I don't think that's good enough, unfortunately. People just dismiss the dialogues or malware distributors just learn to provide instructions to bypass any consent dialogues. The benefit of the App Store is that it's impossible to install malware through it. Unless you can provide the better experience while still delivering on that point, it's not much better. As I mentioned above, it's better for techie people but not for the average user and certainly not good enough for my mother to use.
If you put it that way, then sure it more or less necessitates a walled garden and some trusted party that verifies everything (according to its own standards). But then I'm skeptical of this nanny approach. IMO it's okay for technology to require education. After all, locked-down devices have only been a thing for the last 10 years or so. Computers used to be open by default, and operating systems were much less secure in terms of what applications were allowed to do, yet somehow, people survived that.
It's like governments. It can be a surveillance state ruled by a dictator where everything is regulated and everyone is spied on for the sake of "safety". Or it can be something that offers all the freedom you could possibly want, including the freedom to shoot yourself into the foot, both literally and metaphorically.
Sure, but that's what PCs and Linux are for. Macs, macOS, and iOS are not for that purpose. They're meant to be straight-forward and immediately usable as opposed to customizable.
When I was younger, I would probably have loved an Android phone but my 2 attempts with Android phones (like the Nexus) recently were terrible compared to my iPhone. I was constantly messing with things to try and get them working, I had to stop tasks and apps constantly in the app manager (and even had to download a different app manager), and was constantly waiting for things. Now, I care more about just being able to pick up my phone and know that it works to do what I want to do at any given point. I'm done messing with things.
> Imagine if windows (or MacOS) had a control panel where you could paste "Update subscription URLs", and uses crypto to verify licenses (optionally), and implemented binary diffs and what not, and provided a standard operating system component for navigating, purchasing, and installing/updating software?
I imagine that being completely unusable for a lot of people, and a total disaster of social engineering and malware exploitation.
Don't get hung up on the "copy and paste an url" technique. It could easily be a digitally signed "RepoData.pkgsrc" file that is opened by some aspect of the built-in windows installer mechanism. It could include branding and all sorts of other ways to verify it's identity.
The real win is empowering developers to reliably communicate these updates to users, and make it simple to update, w/o inundating the user's system tray with 5 different bespoke updaters that act out in different ways.
There's not been nothing stopping anyone developing exactly this on MacOS or Windows for 30 years. In fact you could go and develop it right now. If both platforms can support third party stores like Steam, if it's so easy to do then this should be entirely doable.
I suspect the reason something like this hasn't been done is that it's actually a heck of a lot harder than you think.
TBH, I think it's less "hard", and more "network effects".
And given Microsoft's Monopoly nonsense in the 90's they probably did not have the stomach to wipe all the bespoke installer generator products off the map in one stroke.
Package managers have existed on Linux since... I don't know but I've never used a Linux distro without one.
The difficulty isn't technical, it's social, if you build a third party store you have something like Homebrew or Cocoa. It works, but it's never going to be used by the majority of users.
The Mac App Store has multiple reasons for existing, but the whole gestalt of it is a mixed bag with both blessings and curses.
Also the Mac App Store updating system is just damned terrible compared to the Sparkle updater. The only advantage it has is that it is centralized, but I have found it to be one of the slowest and buggiest parts of using the Mac App Store.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Before App Stores and widespread Internet access software had to ship relatively feee of bugs. There was no “We’ll fix it in post”. When you bought a game you got a physical copy of it, not a revocable license to an online service. Software wasn’t blocked from running on your device because the creators’ political views differed from the manufacturer.
Best of all, when you purchased software it went directly to the developer instead of a rent-seeking middle-man like Apple or Google. Even security was better, because you weren’t forced to connect your computer to the Internet to use it. Yes, I’d say those days were an improvement over what we have now!
> And yet, it seems majority of HN wants to rewind from the App Store which was created as to assist users and devs with that problem.
Well, to be fair the App Store isn’t really a viable solution to these problems to a fair bit of applications. The sandbox requirement makes a large portion of ‘useful’ apps unable in the App Store.
Looks like most non-App Store apps use Sparkle[0] these days though, so it’s much better than before.
Sparkle is great but, for some reason, it never works on the apps that I have that use it. I check the box to automatically update apps in the future and I still get prompted every time there's an update. Even then, I hit the update button and the update fails and then I have to restart the app, try again, and then it succeeds... until the next time there's an update and the process starts all over again. At least with the App Store, all my apps update at night and they're ready to go when I need to use them.
iTunes came from an acquisition of SoundJam. Apple didn’t have much first party apps at the time, so it was important to include software to make the computer usable out of the box.
This is speculation, but this may be related to resource compression and them trying to get the iTunes download size as small as possible since so many people were on dialup at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26415883
System 7 added that overall capability, and Apple shipped 4 different built-in resource compression algorithms over the years (the last of those added in OS 9), but it was equally possible for third parties to ship their own decompression routine's machine code along with the other resources. I remember iTunes using InstallerVISE, and I know VISE came with its own compression routines.
It already comes with Apple TV preloaded, whether you like it or not. Apple isn't adverse to frontloading you with subscription models, as long as it's a Premium™ experience.
Indeed. Just in case people weren't aware, the TV app is where you can purchase movies and TV shows from iTunes, or watch your own video content if you get it into the library.
“Adobe has released a new version of Creative Suite optimized for Apple’s M1.” You don’t even really need to invoke the concept of architectures to understand “it was slower on the M1 before; now it’s faster, because Adobe did work to focus on support for it.”
i hate these preloaded bloatwares that come on your computers. they don't even work and only exist to remind you to give them money, in order to unlock features you didn't know you needed.
This was my thought as well since I thought photoshop went way of the subscription. Effectively bloatware some customers will have to mess around to delete. But that is where my complaining ends as someone who runs windows 10 sigh
My first read was really confusing. I kind of blanked out that photoshop was from Adobe and read that “Adobe photoshopped ships on macs” as in ships photoshopped on images of Macs for some marketing reason.
Which is hilarious, because you could make a good case that neither would still exist today without the other. I'd qualify that by saying Adobe products work find on Microsoft operating systems now, but without the Mac years I'm not sure the Windows port would have ever caught on.
There was a time when Apple was shipping dual-processor G4s, but Mac OS 9, in general, could only use one processor. There was a system extension that allowed Photoshop to use both. A co-worker of mine had one, and it was very much a system used for running Photoshop. At that time OS X was considered too slow for professional work. So bundling made a lot of sense.
Sure it won't take long for them to add more bloat and slow it down.
Wish I could cancel my creative cloud subscription but there is still prevalent use. Sketch and Figma do a much nicer job of things. Seems Adobe end up copying some of their features but always buried a few more clicks deep.
I love (and own) all the Affinity products, but Designer still has a long way to go to get to feature parity with Illustrator, imho. Good news is, they are always improving.
Designer feels like working with an arm tied behind my back. I absolutely hate Adobe's subscription model, software philosophy, and nearly everything else about them. But Designer has a long way to go to being productive.
As someone who is not professional in graphics but need to do some vector graphics for professional work, I like Affinity Designer very much. Once it clicks, it’s actually easy to use and quite productive.
That said, its probably not a marketable skill by itself as most places would look for the “Adobe Illustrator” keyword.
One gotcha is there is no native bitmap trace. The developers currently recommend using external software to do so.
Otherwise, I've been able to bang out some quick vector layouts since some of the basic hotkeys are the same, and it seems to handle almost any vector format I've opened with it.
They don’t currently offer a Lightroom alternative. Affinity photo is a photoshop replacement, but doesn’t really offer photo organization capabilities like Lightroom does.
I too am tired of paying for Lightroom every month
Depending on your Lightroom use, check out CaptureOne. Great RAW editor, fantastic if you shoot tethered with supported cameras, not so great for organizing photos.
Affinity wouldn't let me switch my 3 month old Affinity Designer for OS X license with a Windows license when my laptop got stolen. They wanted me to pay $70 for another license, and their support was quite rude about it. The reason they gave me was "it would be unfair to the other customers that paid full price for both platforms".
I have a bad taste in my mouth about the ordeal and have been boycotting their software in protest. Because of how rude their support was, I would rather pay Adobe than spend a single dollar more at Affinity.
In HN of all places, I would expect people to understand that it costs money to maintain a product for different systems.
And it wasn't even their fault, your laptop getting stolen is not on them [1]. There's a lot of bullshit with services (like Amazon not refunding you the difference on an order if the price goes down before your item arrives), but this doesn't seem like one of them.
Also, if you paid $70 for designer, then that kind of sucks because I almost always see it for 50% off. Case and point, it's $35 right now.
[1] I am trying to make a point that's purely technical, but I don't want to seem too callous - I am sorry your laptop got stolen, it sucks to lose something expensive that is very important, and has a lot of important data on it. And I know responses like mine are the last thing someone with anger wants to hear (I've been in that position), but I run my own business and I am also on the other side now where it's really hard to deal with situations like this.
> I would expect people to understand that it costs money to maintain a product for different systems.
Huh? What has that got to do with this case? They're already maintaining it on multiple systems and its not like aetherspawn would be able to use it on more than one system. It literally is no different to the Affinity devs whether aetherspawn is using the OS X or Windows version since they both cost the same amount (and the license was only three months old).
It just seems like they wanted another sale to allow access to a second platform, which would make sense if they retained access to the first.
I'm not sure what the right approach is here (certainly being rude about it isn't it, though!) but every time a company has given me leeway, I've always then went around telling everyone who would listen how great the company is. Seems like they did the opposite by alienating the customer instead. That doesn't seem like a good approach.
I think the point is that its a one and done transaction. You bought the software on platform X. 3 months in it might engender goodwill to swap it. But bought software deactivation isn't really a thing...
Now subscriptions. I notices my jetbrains stuff worked with the same license key when I switched it to linux. But I'm paying them yearly.
I'll totally agree there is no need to be rude. Though I imagine if you are in customer service for a while, its probably a natural defensive posture.
They're basically trying to make a sale, a windfall, from an existing customer's personal troubles. It's not a sale they would have made except for the guy needing to switch laptops. Frame it however you want, but that kind of thing makes people feel taken advantage of.
Yeah, that's my thought too. The fact that it is cheap makes me think they could have been more flexible, under the circumstances of someone who ran into some hardship.
But even if not, they could have simply said sorry, our policy is that we don't do this. aetherspawn said they were rude about it. There was no reason to be rude, they could have said no while still being empathic to the situation and being courteous. I don't know how rude they were or weren't, of course.
I might agree with the goodwill argument if it wasn't for the fact that Affinity apps are _so cheap_. When I wanted to give them more money for yet another free updated that added several features, I happily paid for the iOS version even though I didn't really need it.
Sorry but I think you’re wrong. If your customer accidentally spills their drink you give them a replacement for free. It’s not a requirement, it’s just the kind of decency that builds good will, especially when the marginal cost to you is very low. Same principle applies here, where the marginal cost is literally zero.
No its more like you bought a new car stereo that only works with bmw cars and then your car got stolen. Then you ask the stereo shop to give you a ford version for free because you cant afford to buy a bmw again. Its the wrong place to ask this and he is asking for a different product.
Its explicitly part of their biz model to charge for different platforms in liu of doing the subscription thing.
The marginal cost of the stereo is probably over a hundred dollars. The marginal cost of a drink and of a software license is zero. If your customer for some reason can’t use the previous license due to unforeseen circumstances, just give them a new one that they can use. If you lose your license key, most software vendors will give you a new one too.
> The margical cost of the stereo is probably over a hundred dollars
> just give them a new one that they can use
It always rubs me the wrong way when a customer decides what value something has to a business, assuming they know everything about the business' incomings and outgoings, assuming they know the size of the business, assuming that all businesses must operate the same way because some businesses have the flexibility to offer acts of goodwill.
It makes the assumption that all businesses, especially in software, are on equal footing. They very much aren't. Sorry, but the customer can't always be right — the business has its own bills to take care of, employees to pay, rights to licence, and lights to keep on; beyond what the customer paid for, it really doesn't have any further obligations. Good will is exactly that: good will.
The marginal cost of a software license is approximately zero. And selling an extra license due to a lost device is a windfall, from an already paying customer, that would not have occurred but for the lost device. People will interpret that intuitively as the business taking advantage of them.
Yes. No problem with Adobe switching licenses to other machines. You just log in and select which machines you want to remove the license from, and you can switch them around easily.
I switched to Affinity Photo as an alternative [1] and quite happy with it. It's similar enough to Photoshop that I'm not lost, more polished than Gimp, and only a fraction of the price. Their forum is also quite good for support.
Affinity Photo and Designer are great tools, they are cross-platform (although you have to purchase them separately), and regularly go on sale (I bought both for 70$ total).
I have yet to find a task I used to use Photoshop or Illustrator for that I can't do with these. I am not a hardcore or super advanced user, but that's why it works for me.
Pretty sure there are lots of valid definitions of "cross-platform", and I will say again that context matters.
If I'm talking about a mobile app and I say "cross-platform" I probably meant iOS and Android. It would be strange to say "what about Linux??" in that context.
So here we are talking about competitors to Adobe products, where "cross-platform" means Windows and Mac, so when I say "cross-platform" in this context, I am also referring to that same set of platforms.
With linux desktop use at ~1.5% and dropping, at some point it becomes bad business to support it. It's not adobe's job to pick OS's for their users, it's their job to support the OS's that their users use. And their users are about 99% Windows/Mac it seems.
When you cover about 98-99% of your users platforms, I think you're cross platform.
Otherwise, we could define a cross-platform slippery slope such that no software has ever achieved it. There's always another platform you didn't support.
I mean, yes. Functional cross-platform doesn't mean "every single platform ever", and hitting 98% is a fantastic target.
Listen, I love linux, and it's not MY fault that the year of the Linux Desktop never came and that its marketshare has continued to fall against its competitors.
I cancelled my subscription a few days ago. It was the most painfull procedure ever. Help article points to a cancellation button, which does not exist. Contact page leads to nowhere. Chat bot points you to the useless help section. Finally a real human behind the chatbot answers, but takes extra long time to make you lose any remaining patience or hope. Finally after 1 hour of various counter offers and discounts, they accept the cancellation request.
I have never witnessed a subscription cancellation process this obstructive. It should be illegal.
Same here but in my case I did find the cancel subscription button, it just gave an "error" when I tried to use it. Required me to talk to support before cancelling.
That is in addition to their scammy practice of displaying a monthly price, but locking you into a yearly contract. You pay monthly, but if you cancel within the year they charge you a cancellation fee that is essentially equal to the entire remaining subscription. Not sure if they do that anymore, but that was the case with my sub 2 years ago.
This is why I have gone to using virtual cards online.
When you want to cancel, you go to one central repository with all your virtual cards and turn off the card for the service you want to cancel. When your next payment comes up, the card will decline, the service will close your account for you. Easy cancellation.
This is really something I've been thinking for quite some time, canceling my CC subscription (which is monthly) but there are couple of things that kept from executing this decision; first of course loong years of habit (almost 20), hard to leave. After switching to Figma for UI design, my main use of CC for branding, print design is left to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and photography editing for Lightroom. I can ditch the others in CC apps in an instant, but I can't Photoshop and Illustrator, because the branding design works need mockups, brushes, textures, stuff and web resources mostly made for PS, also I've a huge offline archive I like using, also there is print work, which I use Illustrator mainly. Adobe products really make me mad, they work in weird ways, crash, lost work and data, plus couple of times in a year something happens to make me connect to client support, these are the times that I really want to cut my all connection with the company and their products.
At some point I'll manage to figure this out and take a bold step further to leave Adobe all behind. I know there are options, tried most of them (Affinity etc), but I make my living through these apps and I need reliable software with resources and community, just like Figma did in a great way for UX/product design, I wish they create side products like CC apps, for print design, even audio design, that would be awesome.
Thank you, we want to try this. I despise subscription model software. I wish I could find my Adobe Photoshop 6.0 disk, it did everything I need just fine.
I just tried this and while I appreciate the attempt to make it relatively the same UI as Photoshop most of the things I tried didn't work like they would in Photoshop.
I couldn't apply a filter to a shape layer, which I can do in Photoshop. It didn't blur out the option, I had to click it to find out I couldn't do it.
I did try to gaussian blur a layer and it did nothing until I hit 50px then at 51px it basically blurred everything out of existence. I tried this in Photoshop and it behaved in a more linear way, as I'd expect.
This would actually be less of a problem if every Photoshop alternative didn't try to be a pixel perfect clone of Photoshop. Take some risks, evaluate some choices and see if you can do things better than Photoshop. Otherwise the comparisons will be too stark.
I understand a lot of the vitriol towards Adobe for a number of reasons, but for some reason they just do photo/image editing better than anyone else. I keep waiting for the day a FOSS alternative pops up that actually competes.
I switched to "PDF Expert" (developer is Readdle I think) on the mac and its equivalent on mobile. Its easier to use than Acrobat ever was and costs less per year.
I've started using Pixelmator Pro, and I've been impressed so far. Much faster, snappier, and things like filters and color correction adjustments better designed, and without the bloat and cruft that comes with Photoshop.
They write that any GPU workload scores similar to the intel internal graphic[1].
For the total scores, they're intentionally using an old beta of the benchmark as it includes an older CPU workload that the M1 happens to excel at.
Seems a little like they're cherry picking results. Interesting, but a little dishonest.
----
[1]: Quoting the article:
> Unsurprisingly, the M1 Mac mini loses to the competition in raw GPU performance, more-or-less matching the onboard graphics of the quad-core Core i7 that’s in the 13-inch MacBook Pro (full review here).
Beating the integrated graphics in an i7 is nothing, especially on the older chips. Intel integrated has never been about performance. It really isn't saying much when comparing to the 10th gen chips. They use the old Iris graphics. Apple didn't adopt the 11th gen which are actually contemporary to the M1 and use an entirely new integrated gpu.
Those chips will probably not be out until later this year and will take another couple months to show up in laptops. By then we will see the midrange versions of the M1. In Macbook pros.
I agree wholeheartedly, but a small correction: those chips are available now if you're very very lucky. For example, the latest ROG Zephyrus is available from my neighborhood Best Buy. The M1 has been readily available for months, and we'll probably see Apple's new pro chips by the time AMD's supply chain issues are sorted.
My bet is Ryzen will be slightly competitive this time around (at maybe double the power usage), but Apple will increase performance by 10-20% per year and eventually AMD will start lagging behind.
Not only is your post an example of the Moving goalposts fallacy [0].
Is also an apples to orange comparison.
The M1 was being compared to an i7, and that was I was responding to.
It will also not "be interesting", since if we part from "M1 does not beat current discrete GPUs" as per grandparent comment, it will obviously not beat an upcoming one, whatever the wattage will be.
4th generation Ryzen parts are expected to replace their Vega-based integrated GPU with an RDNA2 integrated GPU. That comment was not about discrete GPUs.
It is an entry level chip. And it’s a fantastic one.
But a comparison is a comparison even if lopsided, and when people are pushing this as “As fast as high end Intel”, it’s going to be squared against high end intel setups with discrete GPUs.
The M1 is absolutely fantastic. But it does absolutely fall short in some (arguably small) ways. Pointing those out isn’t unfair.
I think they might be referring to the power used by the chip, which is indeed comparable to entry-level chips.
The thought is that if it runs this fast right now, imagine what it’ll be like when you put a big heat sink and fan on it and let it use 100w or something, on a Mac Pro. And more - this is a first generation product. Imagine what the second generation will be like.
I think people are just excited for the possibilities. We’ll see how it all turns out, but it really does seem promising.
Actually, I agree with the sibling commenter that power consumption is not a good predictor of whether a chip is entry level.
Estimate of TDP for the M1 silicon are about 20-24W [0].
The i7-1185G7E can be offered at anywhere within 12-28W TDP [1].
This 12-28W figure is exactly the same for the i3-1115G4E [2].
Yes, there's some trickery in Intel's TDP numbers, but based on Anandtech's results for that i7 [3], it looks like lower TDP means that you can't burst for as long.
The i3-530 is a 10-year old desktop CPU, so of course it uses more power. The M1 can go up to 39w, which is comparable to the Ryzen you mentioned. I didn’t know either, and looked it up before commenting to make sure I didn’t make any wildly incorrect claims.
The M1 is an incredible achievement, but let’s try to remain honest about the numbers.
The i3 desktop CPU is an entry level CPU because it can still handle entry level workloads, consuming a lot more energy than the state of the art because providing high end performances while consuming less energy than the competitors is not worth the entry level segment money.
Entry level means (IMO) good enough for as little money as possible in a non pro field (as in: your salary do not depend on the performances of the device)
M1 Macs are not in that segment.
> The M1 is an incredible achievement, but let’s try to remain honest about the numbers.
> 1) macs are not entry level, entry level is a 350$ laptop mounting an i3
It depends on how you see it:
The M1 is the entry level chip for the whole upcoming M-series, this is a logical FACT.
It's hard to estimate how much an M1 costs but I would say it's closer to an i5 than to an i3 simply because the price tags can afford it.
Apple could make a profitable $350 plastic laptop with some kind of watered down m1 chip, they just don't want to.
> 2) it doesn't matter unless you work with the laptop sitting on the bare skin of your legs
It's in the name.... "LAP" "TOP", regardless this is not about temperate, this is about efficiency. The 18 hours battery life works both on and off your laps ;).
They're similar, but it is not "basically the a14". This is like saying that an Intel Core i9 is basically the same as a Core i5. Sure it has a lot of similarities, but they have very different thermal and performance characteristics.
>My high end Dell XPS was $2600, and the M1 Air blows it away for half the price.
Isn't "blowing it away" a little hyperbole? An XPS with 1185G7 has around ~10% worse single core and ~25% worse multi-core CPU performance than the M1. An improvement sure, but not the leap some people make it out to be.
I don't notice a 10% worse single core performance, but what I do notice is going OOM because the Air is limited to 16GB RAM (base model 8GB is personally unusable in 2021). Or being limited to 1 external display due to the design of the M1.
Apple silicon needs to support at least 2 external displays before I can consider one and I'm honestly surprised they currently do not. The next generation of Apple chips might be useful, particularly if linux kernel support improves too. A 2023 Macbook Pro has a lot of potential.
The XPS 13 is also limited to 16 GB of RAM, and it's actually more expensive than a M1 Macbook Air, so I'm not sure why you're using that as a comparison. Even if you bump the Air to 16gb of RAM and 512GB SSD it's still $50 cheaper than the comparable XPS 13 which is $1499, which btw has a worse 1920x1200 screen vs the 2560x1600 one on the Air.
I'm not sure what source you're using for performance. But at least with Geekbench 5 results it's not as close as you're saying. The M1 Macbook Air scores 1699 in single core, and 7362 in multi-core[1]. The Intel Core i7-1185G7 scores 1446 in single core and 4924 in multi-core[2]. That's about 18% better single-core and 50% better multi-core performance, for me that's a pretty big difference.
This isn't true, I have an XPS 13 (9310) with 32 GB of RAM. You can also get the XPS 13 with a 4k screen, although I do not understand why you would. 1920x1200 is already much higher DPI than I care for, 2560x1600 and 4k are just a battery drain.
I'm going off my own benchmarks using Geekbench 5, where the M1 scored 1700 single core and 7500 multi core, and the 1185G7 scored 1550/6000 multi core. (There are people with better results than this on Geekbench as well.)
I wasn't making an argument about the price by the way, I do understand the Air is cheaper, but in my opinion it is cheaper because it is a lesser quality device with key functionality missing. Of course, for some people the Macbook Air is the best value because they don't need or care about these things. Which is totally OK, but having used both devices both the Air and the MBP are non-starters for me.
As I said, I hope future revisions can improve things and be more competitive.
Yes, it isn't only about pure performance numbers. Better performance with much lower heat, much better battery life. "Blows it away." Every laptop seems to have a drawback or two however.
Which just has a bigger storage, but the performance is the same as in the cheapest one. There’s no point taking the most expensive option and try to invalidate the results because of it.
And yes, for development sub $1000 laptops are entry level.
MacBook Air costs 3x the price of a Dell Inspiron. The Mac laptops seem to be great (I've never owned one, have ordered one though), but they're not entry level. It might be Apple's entry level, but it's not the markets entry level.
For someone who is using Photoshop as a professional, $999 really is not far off from entry-level. People easily spend $2500+ on computers for professional work that requires high performance. Sure you can use a $350 Dell Inspiron for Photoshop work, but it's not going to be very practical. Performance, battery life, and even the actual screen will be pretty poor at that price point.
I don't understand what is behind the "filter" benchmarks, and it smells a bit fishy. Image filtering are (should be) highly GPU intensive tasks, so what does it mean to score low on "GPU" but somehow high on "filtering".
I think this is more a testament to the quality of Adobe's GPU pipeline (or lack thereof). M1's GPU is surprisingly capable for a 10W part, and more importantly, it supports low-latency CPU/GPU communication and opt-in memory page sharing. The later is especially interesting for creative software, as CPU and GPU can work on the same data structure, eliminating the need for copies or GPU buffer management. Knowing Adobe however, it's probably most likely that they are still using OpenCL, so the lack of performance is not surprising.
P.S. Or maybe the GPU test is simply memory bandwidth limited...
The workload on Photoshop should be a mix of CPU with GPU acceleration. And possibly NPU with M1.
So the reference to GPU was even with a discrete GPU doing whatever acceleration Adobe has done for Nvidia, the M1 is still faster. And doing so with a Power Usage that is far less than its competitor. Of course if we only focus on "GPU" category than the results as listed is quite clear.
Which leads me to believe the NPU and CPU may have played a big part of it.
Results are a little strange. Theoretically speaking, the M1 is a 2.6 TFlop GPU at FP32. The Macbook Pro they are benching it with is just 1 TFlop. to get the exact same result on a GPU with 2.6X the FP perfromance seems....unusual. I would be interested to see if their benchmark is a limiting factor here as realword is dramatically different.
Thing is, Ryzen Zen3 is supposed to be pretty close to M1 on efficiency as well - this is why I want to see numbers comparing them because they're closer in capability than some obsolete Intel chip.
I suppose it depends largely on whether you consider a laptop with a 1080p laptop and a sluggish SSD a good value. Seems to me often the “Value” you get is simply going cheap on components. Mediocre display, barely useable trackpad, slow SSD, fan noise, thermal throttling, etc.
The current MacBook Air is a phenomenal value with almost no compromises.
1080p is perfect for my eyes (and games). My $1030 laptop has a mid-high end NVMe 512GB SSD. Display is 144Hz, 330-nit, 100% sRGB, muffled fan noise only when playing high-end games (RTX 2060 6GB), zero heat issues or thermal throttling (max ~75°C gaming). So I guess it's just another great value with almost no compromises.
(The Air and mine have different compromises. High-end gaming, wider selection of games, bigger screen vs minimal/no heat output, amazing battery, better portability. But I do think some of your assumptions about what is possible in the value segment aren't current.)
MacBook Air isn't marketed as a "Gaming" laptop, nor would anyone buy it as such. Claiming it's compromised because it's not great for gaming is like claiming the Xbox is compromised because it's not good at video editing.
My original comment was about each comparison fitting. The M1 is an expensive entry-level thin and light, but you get excellent performance and battery life. So it does that job well. But to say it has "no compromises" would say it could work for everyone. But it isn't a well-rounded laptop because of the screen size, OS, lack of GPU power, etc. Those things don't hurt you if you're happy with MacOS, the screen size, don't care about many games, etc. so it's not a "compromise" for your use case.
Not sure what that has to do with marketing - I mean you can buy based on marketing, but the original discussion was about comparing entry-level laptops and high-end laptops to the Macbook Air, and excluding Ryzen because they aren't in high-end laptops.
> But it isn't a well-rounded laptop because of the screen size, OS, lack of GPU power, etc.
You are off in the sticks. By your definition, nothing is "Well rounded". Every product is designed for a purpose. Value is about how well a product suits its that purpose. When I buy a hammer, I don't complain because it doesn't work as a screwdriver.
Your continued assumption here is that every computer needs to be suitable for gaming and that assumption is nonsense.
> original discussion was about comparing entry-level laptops and high-end laptops to the Macbook Air, and excluding Ryzen because they aren't in high-end laptops.
Your original comment which I replied to was talking about how Ryzen wins on value. Which is only the case if you are willing to accept lower end components, less battery life, and fan noise.
> Which is only the case if you are willing to accept lower end components, less battery life, and fan noise.
But this is only the case if you compare $1200 versions of the Macbook Air to $400-500 laptops...
My previous comment already discussed the existence of $1000-1200 laptops with Ryzen that don't have "lower end components" or "fan noise" (outside of gaming, which we can't compare on because we're excluding that as a possible compromise.)
Sure we're getting a bit into terminology. Long battery life is a feature, just like a full selection of games - it is a compromise to have less of either. It's not a critical compromise depending on what you buy the machine for.
Critical compromises (again mostly in the eye of the buyer) could arguable be bad quality or unusable screens, like those with poor color representation that prevent professional work.
Lenovo is much better than Dell and has announced a lot of Ryzen 5xxx laptops. Not sure if the Thinkbooks/Thinkpads are available yet but they are coming.
AMD just caught up (to Intel) in 2020 in laptop efficiency, and the OEMs are starting to catch up in offerings in 2021. However, availability is a mess in general lately. Might be 2022 before really high-end laptops offer Ryzen regularly.
The M1 is honestly very good value and the overall best mobile chip right now which is rare for Apple. Unless you need a PC. Goes toe to toe with my big desktop machine on dev workloads.
I swear Illustrator takes longer to launch now from a fast SSD than it did from a slow laptop HDD 15 years ago. Input latency is awful. Something's gone crazily wrong with the bloat in Adobe applications.
I would jump on an optimised version of Illustrator with the feature set from 10 (or more) years ago.
I bought Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign CS2 a long time ago. Still use it since it's mostly for hobby and very occasional freelance. There's a tiny bit of jank running it on Windows 10, but otherwise it starts quickly and runs perfectly. The only thing I'd change if I could is to have a 64 bit version. This one chokes occasionally on very large files. But I don't deal with those enough to invest in the subscription.
For Mac, CS2 was PowerPC binary. It ran on the first Intels with Rosetta, but that's not usable for a long time now. Mac users, if they want Photoshop, they must go for subscription.
CS6 was the last. But even on Intel processors, running it on Catalina or later is crash-prone and requires a fair bit of hacking around. The main problem is that there were still chunks of 32-bit code in there and macOS has stopped supporting that.
This. I'm keeping a Mac mini on Mojave specifically to run Illustrator CS6. The price of an Intel Mac mini on eBay is fairly competitive with 2 years of Illustrator CC payments.
I feel this every time I start up my old Adobe CS4 on my private (somewhat older) Thinkpad. While the work notebook (Dell Latitude whatever) is faster than the Thinkpad, the current Adobe CC surely takes longer so start than the CS4.
Not anymore! Adobe has been taking the activation servers offline for its older products for some time now. Newer versions as I understand it are the service model "Creative Cloud" meanwhile
Yeah I know it varies from person to person but for me the addition of useful features I use with any regularity stopped at like… CS2. And if I’m being honest, I’d have no issue getting along with CS1 or even pre-CS 6.x/7.x.
Generally I dislike this kind of view and find it not to be true.
But in this case… man, it feels like Adobe deliberately try to slow down Photoshop and the wider CS suite. I used to use these a lot back in early CS days, but I've used the trials recently and by far the biggest offenders are some of the bad UIs that they've slapped on top of things like creating new documents, or Photoshop's "Home Screen".
They're slow as molasses, provide minimal useful features, and there is an explicit option to turn them off and use the legacy versions (usually a massive red flag to me that a feature is shite).
Man it's that bad I've literally stopped my Adobe subscription and moved on to Affinity products. It's 95% as good. (Better than how you'd compare DDG to Google for example). And so much cheaper. Also Adobe has so much crapware on my computer.
They changed their rendering engine for Photoshop a couple of years back and ever since it’s been slow as hell. I’m in Photoshop at least 20 hours a week and I’m still using Photoshop 2019.
I suppose that would depend on how many of those machines were set up with Migration Assistant, which transfers nearly all the cruft from an old machine, all the way down to Homebrew packages and other CLI tools. Doesn’t really feel like a “new computer” when you’re greeted with the same desktop and console.
My anecdata last weekend was 60% to 90% JavaScript benchmarks from a loaded 15” to an M1 Air, that coupled with no fans screaming at me sure felt new.
Hasn't been my experience. Photoshop, for all its clunky UI decisions (at some point it had Flash-driven panels too e.g.), has always been very fast, and fastest than the competition in large image processing.
I heard Jim Keller say on a podcast recently that many computation problems are N^2, so if unoptimized and run on silicon with 2x the transistors, it runs 4x slower.
Exactly. In the 90s PCs jumped from a few 100MHz to 3GHz in a few years. Now that was impressive. This on the other hand is just plain old evolution of technology.
I'm afraid you're remembering incorrectly. The Pentium 100Mhz was released in 1994. The last Pentium released in 1999 was the PIII 800Mhz. There wasn't a 3GHz release until 2010.
And that's just clock speed. Compare any 2010 chip to something like a Ryzen 5800x and see how the benchmarks scores look.
Is it faster on the M1 chip because they made a proper build for it compared to before on the M1 chip, or are they saying it's 50% faster on M1 than on other hardware?
Edit: Title is now edited from what it was, it included a statement about speedup I couldn't find explained the same in the post
It contains this quote though
> Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems.
So I guess it's faster than on other systems, but still vague about compared to what.
At first, I thought the OP wrote a bad title.. This is the same heading from the adobe blog. Terrible copy writers, and terrible publication approval process over there.
I can't be the only one who read the list of features that are not finished porting yet and thought "Yeah makes sense".
Current day photoshop feels like a duct taped ball of random systems and frameworks that somehow function within the same app, until you get a few too many OS updates ahead then parts of that system start breaking.
Good luck. I had enough and dropped my Adobe paid subscription because they decided Windows 8.1 was a verboten platform for some reason. Not Windows versions prior to 8.1, mind you, because Windows 7 and regular Windows 8 was still supported. Also the same day I purchased all the Affinity products (which, incidentally, cost as much as 1.5 months of Creative Cloud subscription): https://twitter.com/pixelbath/status/1268767475685945344/pho...
Completely baffling to me, and I've built a huge chunk of my design career using Adobe tools.
Please explain how putting development resources into firstly, porting; and secondly, supporting, a fourth (MacOS, iPadOS, Windows and then Linux) platform that ~1% of non-server computers use works, business-wise?
Especially then they're not selling the products for several hundred to start, and moved to a subscription model...
From what I've experienced and read, the cost of supporting a platform has to be greater than its sales.
The second issue with this is that many people use Linux to specifically avoid using closed-source software.
No part about Photoshop on Linux makes sense, from any sort of serious business end. They haven't even done an Android tablet port of full-fledged Photoshop, and I haven't really read any plans to support it.
If WINE wasn't a thing, or GIMP wasn't a thing...well, even then; no. This would never happen. XD
I have no stake in this, but at the mention of Photoshop I have to say...I bought Affinity Photo a couple weeks back, and it's fantastic. Runs without issue on my underpowered MacBook Air, and cost less than $40. I'm super happy to see such a strong competitor in this space.
> There are still a few features we haven’t finished porting to run on the new M1 chip, primarily a couple of those we most recently shipped (Invite to Edit Cloud Documents, Preset Syncing, most notably).
This is an interesting detail—I'm surprised that either of these features are things that wouldn't "just work" when compiled for another architecture.
Don't worry it's total trash on Windows these days too, I use both platforms and its a complete jank-fest on both with dog slow UI redraw and even basic painting app functionality that ran fine on systems 20 years ago is now slow and glitchy.
(recent Intel MacBook Pro and high end multi-GPU workstation PC)
Adobe started to rest on their laurels about 6 years ago and the results of that choice get more prominent each year as bitrot sets in. Nothing about their software is empowering anymore it's actually just limiting when you see what your computer is truly capable of in software that is written to make use of its modern power.
Within 5 years every piece of Adobe software will be displaced and people will be looking back in disbelief asking "How could they fall so far, they owned the market?"
Also gonna do my part to help their downfall, if you (unfortunately have to for work) pay £49.94 a month to use full Creative Cloud you're being ripped off, I've only paid £30.34 a month for 4 years now, when it's renewal time just keep telling them you're cancelling and it's too expensive and after about 5 minutes of pushing they'll knock a lot off.
> it has a horrible horrible draw/render bug. it blanks out with grey for 90% of the image
Oh so that wasn't just my hardware? I didn't realize it was a widespread issue. I've been experiencing that bug for at least a year now. I could go on, but there aren't enough hours left in the day.
How has the relationship been between Apple and Adobe ever since Steve Jobs declared war on Adobe Flash and effectively being the final nail in the coffin for Flash? Seems like there would be a lot to repair when even Adobe snarked back
Well that was a decade ago (2011)... Welcome to 2021.
Adobe and Apple have been working together for a long time since then. Appearing in keynotes, doing demos on screen, and directly referencing eachother's products.
Whatever hatchet they had with eachother (if they ever did) is buried.
It was my understanding that apps without special x86-only inlined assembly would be straightforward to port. This could hint that LR, as slow as it is, actually has special vectorized or otherwise performance-boosted sections of code.
I expect Photoshop to contain many highly optimized function routines for photo processing. These routines are optimized by hand and usually use architecture-specific features such as SSE/AVX which is not portable.
Unoptimized (more portable) versions of theses routines exists, but I suspect they will perform well even with M1.
This happens in Linux apps as well. Vendors like Discrete will have restrictions on what kernel version, which distro, what hardware that is really no different. With a Mac, you just don't have a choice on the hardware to install. On Linux, you have a choice, but only from the 2 options listed and you have to build it yourself.
>I expect Photoshop to contain many highly optimized function routines
Ah, I see you have never had the pleasure of using it.
Sarcasm aside, the whole Adobe suite makes atrocious use of your machines actual power, most is still single core. My machine can simulate the entire virtualized interactions of simulated light photons on glass on multiple GPUs in the time it takes photoshop to encode a GIF.
and you think "well maybe encoding the gif is more work?" yet try any GIF encoder written in pure Javascript and they still outperform Photoshop and also the 3D render.
> architecture-specific features such as SSE/AVX which is not portable.
I don’t have hands-on experience, but somewhere on HN I saw this: https://github.com/simd-everywhere/simde If starting a new cross-platform project today, I would try that library first, before doing the usual intrinsics.
I’d have to imagine some of the work they’ve done to make iOS apps, and the work they started to make a Windows on ARM version of Photoshop helped a bit.
Nope, they've been kicking and screaming a verrry long time for the PPC -> intel migration, with a lot of people legitimating it due to hand optimized PPC code
Ah thanks. However the need has to be there first. Linux users who need to use the suite of Adobe products on Linux will likely never represent a critical mass, that will nudge the FOSS community to build alternatives on-par with the Adobe suite.
