Scarily Fast

I'm only really interested in desktops¹ so haven't checked out everything on offer but the new M3 Macs look quite nice (apart from the colours ), and the release date could solve the problem of choosing a birthday present to buy myself

Still the problem of stingy storage and memory on the base models and the cost of upgrading it to sensible levels², but I could get back £350-odd if I elected to trade this one in (27" Intel iMac) which would sweeten the pill a bit... just leaves the issue of whether this screen real estate addict could get used to a 24" display.

Decisions, decisions...



¹ the thread title is give scope for thread drift for those with other interests

²eta- I sometimes wonder if Apple are trying to increase customers' use of the Cloud... for which they can charge more money

Edited by billford (Tue 31-Oct-23 10:23:02)

All Apple Silicon M-series machines since the first M1 are very brisk little things.

Still extremely happy with my personal M1 Max MacBook Pro which just had its second birthday and the Mac Studio M2 desktop I got earlier this year is a silent but astonishing beast.

I don’t find storage space a problem on my mini. External SSDs (Samsung is my preference) are easily fast enough on a USB C connection and are very cheap nowadays (£130 for 2TB).

But you can’t do anything about the RAM, apart from buying enough in the first place.

TBH, I’m not that fussed about speed; the Intel mini is fast enough for my needs.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

TBH, I’m not that fussed about speed; the Intel mini is fast enough for my needs.

I'm in the same position- this iMac is so much faster than I am for what I want it to do that any increase isn't really relevant... but it's nice to have a new toy occasionally

Apple prices for extra storage and memory have been high for years, worse now with their own silicon. that is why I went for the M2 pro instead of the M2, it worked out better value.
The M3 are fast machines, I know someone who have been waiting for a while and will be a bit disappointed with what is available on the Imac side. They will have to go for a Mac mini instead.

By all accounts, Qualcomm have produced an ARM chip that is faster than the M1 and M2, the problem is Windows on Arm is awful and there is no software. It may get better, we will see.
The thing is a lot of people who buy Apple does so for the eco system or for the OS, not just for speed. Pone of the reason I changed to Apple was because I am fed up with Windows, fed up with Microsoft pushing people into their cloud and pushing to use their search engines and browser. Apple don't do that, I just updated to Sonoma, thought I would have a nose and all my preferences, all my defaults are still there. None of this, please use our browser, it did pop up something about an Apple I.D, but clicked on it and it went away.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

the problem is Windows on Arm is awful and there is no software.

Link?? Not what I've seen or read, with people running Win11/ARM using Parallels on M1 and M2 machines.

If you have a keyboard, screen etc it may be worth waiting a couple of months. There may be a new M3 Mac mini in the works. I’m still using a 09 Mac Pro, mostly for file conversion and running as an appletv file streamer.
A mini will be a huge speed upgrade for me and the cinema led screen still works fine.

Windows on ARM isn’t awful.

It is awful on the current non Apple ARM machines it runs on, but it runs really well in a VM on Apple silicon.

And as to there being no software available, Office (or at least most of it) and Visual Studio are already ARM native.

But it doesn’t really matter that most things aren’t available built for ARM. Microsoft’s layer for running x86 code on ARM might not be as good as Rosetta, but it still does a good job of running apps. For example I got a friend setup running Autocad in an ARM vm on his Mac mini and it runs better there than it does on his two year old Windows Intel laptop.

He is also running Office in the Windows VM, as the Mac version still isn’t quite in line with the Windows one.

Unless you are trying to play games or are unlucky enough that your x86 app doesn’t run, ARM Windows in Parellels on the Mac is a good and usable solution.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Unless you are trying to play games or are unlucky enough that your x86 app doesn’t run, ARM Windows in Parellels on the Mac is a good and usable solution.

Windows 11 for ARM runs x86 and x64 so its not just legacy Windows applications. DirectX isn't supported so games isn't much use, but that always was an issue in VM on Mac, I know a few Mac owners whom dual booted Intel macs for gaming only.

If the chip competition can release CPUs that are close to M1 performance (and they don't need the other things in the M1 CPU for video conversion or Machine Learning) then some competition to the laptop Macs will appear.

e.g. instant on/off sleep (something Intel x86/64 has problem with)
e.g. 12+ hours battery life (intel Core 12th and later generation can get to 10 hrs)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

the problem is Windows on Arm is awful and there is no software.

Link?? Not what I've seen or read, with people running Win11/ARM using Parallels on M1 and M2 machines.

It used to be, not that I have followed it for a while,.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Windows on ARM isn’t awful.

It is awful on the current non Apple ARM machines it runs on, but it runs really well in a VM on Apple silicon.

And as to there being no software available, Office (or at least most of it) and Visual Studio are already ARM native.

But it doesn’t really matter that most things aren’t available built for ARM. Microsoft’s layer for running x86 code on ARM might not be as good as Rosetta, but it still does a good job of running apps. For example I got a friend setup running Autocad in an ARM vm on his Mac mini and it runs better there than it does on his two year old Windows Intel laptop.

He is also running Office in the Windows VM, as the Mac version still isn’t quite in line with the Windows one.

Unless you are trying to play games or are unlucky enough that your x86 app doesn’t run, ARM Windows in Parellels on the Mac is a good and usable solution.

Fair enough, not that I would spend a load of money on Mac hardware to run Windows.
I still think it will be a few years before ARm chips replace the x64 chips on the majority of windows machines

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I still think it will be a few years before ARm chips replace the x64 chips on the majority of windows machines

Plenty of ARM chips in servers in the cloud data centres

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Plenty of ARM chips in servers in the cloud data centres

I did mean for the home user, and you knew that.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Windows on ARM isn’t awful.

It is awful on the current non Apple ARM machines it runs on, but it runs really well in a VM on Apple silicon.

And as to there being no software available, Office (or at least most of it) and Visual Studio are already ARM native.

But it doesn’t really matter that most things aren’t available built for ARM. Microsoft’s layer for running x86 code on ARM might not be as good as Rosetta, but it still does a good job of running apps. For example I got a friend setup running Autocad in an ARM vm on his Mac mini and it runs better there than it does on his two year old Windows Intel laptop.

He is also running Office in the Windows VM, as the Mac version still isn’t quite in line with the Windows one.

Unless you are trying to play games or are unlucky enough that your x86 app doesn’t run, ARM Windows in Parellels on the Mac is a good and usable solution.

Fair enough, not that I would spend a load of money on Mac hardware to run Windows.
I still think it will be a few years before ARm chips replace the x64 chips on the majority of windows machines

Been happily running W11 Pro on my M1 Max MacBook for a few years now - well since I got the machine in October 2021. It runs perfectly fine.

Found the Mac runs Windows better under Parallels than Microsoft does natively with their Voltera (Snapdragon) dev boxes - although to be fair its not an equivalent / fair fight between the Voltera and an M1 box.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Been happily running W11 Pro on my M1 Max MacBook for a few years now - well since I got the machine in October 2021. It runs perfectly fine.

Found the Mac runs Windows better under Parallels than Microsoft does natively with their Voltera (Snapdragon) dev boxes - although to be fair its not an equivalent / fair fight between the Voltera and an M1 box.

I'm looking forward to 2024 when Qualcomm and Nvidia are apparently going to introduce their new ARM architecture processors for laptops; might be the start of an interesting speed race. I doubt they will have Apple's video processing hardware, but not everyone needs that.

Doesn't Win11 for ARM still have no DirectX, so no games?

You could run CrossOver for DirectX support for gaming stuff...

https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/16/crossover-23-directx-12/

I just discovered Apple released a Game Porting Tool for Sonoma earlier in the year. Has some interesting features like translate DirectX 12 to Metal 3 in real time. As you can see I'm not much of a gamer (that's my teenage son, but his tool of choice is the PS5)

https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/04/apple-game-porting-to...

Watch Video

Can download it directly from the Apple Developer site:
https://developer.apple.com/games/

both interesting options!

Happy Bunny here.

Just loaded up Solidworks '24 (on evaluation). Sales bloke sucked in through his teeth when I said I'd be running it on a Mac with Windows and Parallels 🤔. I did say it was a meaty little Mac Studio and wont break a sweat. He was skeptical. I daren't mention it was an ARM/Apple Silicon Mac rather than Intel. He may have just fallen off his seat 🤣

So I spun up fresh/clean install of Windows 11 for ARM (via Parallels 20) last night. It's all done seamlessly from within Parallels so you don't have to look around for a download link etc. Gladly it's now pulling down the 24H2 version too. The whole Windows install was downloaded and fully installed and running in under 10 minutes. S/Works took another 25 minutes to download and install completely. Pretty good I thought for both.

Runs sweet as a nut! Though I'm not using the CAM module, which I'm told has compatibility issues. However I've thrown resource at it; 96GB of RAM and 12 vCPUs. The Studio is fully kitted though, so that not even half the physical RAM or the processor cores.

Have saved the Win11 / Solidworks VM image in shared cloud, so I can open it up on my MacBook. Brought up the VM this morning and works like a dream on the M3 MacBook Pro.

Seems like Windows for ARM (on a Mac) has finally come to maturity and a level of stability and compatibly that we've not had before. Solidworks is a fussy and demanding application. So I'm impressed.

Edited by Pheasant (Thu 24-Oct-24 11:27:04)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Seems like Windows for ARM (on a Mac) has finally come to maturity and a level of stability and compatibly that we've not had before. Solidworks is a fussy and demanding application. So I'm impressed.

Excellent news. The corporate I work for, and our customers, are all full of lawyers, and are unhappy with both Parallels and (Broadcom owned) VMware fusion licence agreements, as well as how to buy Windows for ARM - so we can't use this at work. My family's M1 Mac Mini is running VMware Fusion with Windows 11 Home for ARM without issue (Fusion also includes the download link and automates the install).

I really want to try one of these new Snapdragon Elite X powered laptops that claim to be similar to the Apple M3... or even next year's intel CPU that is fighting back on laptop performance.

Apple's push has woken the industry, its great to see. Reminds me of the late 1980s/early 1990s when NT3.5 came with support for about 4 architectures !

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Reminds me of the late 1980s/early 1990s when NT3.5 came with support for about 4 architectures !

Indeed! Was at university at the time DEC released the Alpha architecture. Always wanted one. The Itanium…not so much 😂