I've had my 14" M1 Pro for just over a week now. It has performed amazingly. But I also don't install tons of random apps and let them run in the background. I never restore from backups, I manually transfer files from my user folder over to my new setup. I always check whether an app has native M1 support before downloading, though I understand this isn't an option for everyones workflow yet. In cases where the app is literally a wrapper for a website like discord, I just use the website. Or in the case of zoom where I just don't trust the app to be on my computer and the website is sufficient. If something I used previous doesn't have native support I look for an alternative and a couple times I have found something better and/or open-source. I understand rosetta 2 has some issues with overusing swap, so I would rather avoid degrading my ssd and experience.
So far this has worked for me, and I'm able to get two full day's of battery life. I'm away from my desk far more frequently now.
When I first got my M1 MacBook Air I was still a DropBox paid customer. But when the app started using over half a gigabyte of memory, I took more and more stuff out of it and started putting it on iCloud. I've cancelled my subscription and now have less than my grandfathered free space occupied, with no syncing going on.
I have very few apps that require Rosetta 2. In my experience, it works great, but I can no longer imagine having an app that requires Rosetta running constantly in the background. My MBA is only 8GB, and while that is rarely a problem for me, I can't afford to just fritter it away.
You can run homebrew Rosetta though, right? Native is, of course, the preferred direction, but this doesn’t mean you’re hosed on an M1 MacBook by any means.
Several benchmarks have shown that popular x86 apps running in Rosetta on the M1 still run faster than running on native x86 on other machines, so it's probably not going to be an issue.
The software side of things already look good on day 1 due to Apple’s Rosetta2. Whilst the software doesn’t offer the best the hardware can offer, with time, as developers migrate their applications to native Apple Silicon support, the ecosystem will flourish. And in the meantime, the M1 is fast enough that it can absorb the performance hit from Rosetta2 and still deliver solid performance for all but the most CPU-critical x86 applications.
We had a customer testing our video player application recently and asked whether M1 support was there. It was embarrassing to realize we hadn't formally tested on the M1.
Our application is Gstreamer based, which means it uses highly optimized codecs that eventually render to OpenGL. I was very worried it wouldn't work on the M1.
It works flawlessly. Rosetta is amazing. I'm not an Apple fanboy at all but Apple has done an amazing job with M1 and this is true even though many applications are just running x86 code via Rosetta.
I'm confused, because I have Dropbox installed on my m1 Mac and it works fine. Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice?
For something that only has to Sync files do I really need the full power of an m1 processor. Even if it's running slower by the emulation layer, I was not able to notice anything. I even did a bit of stress testing where I was editing a text file in two places at once to see what happened, and Dropbox synced everything within seconds.
For me my M1 was fast enough that the first load didn't seem that different - and more importantly subsequent loads were lighting fast! It's astonishing how good Rosetta 2 is - utterly transparent and faster than my Intel Mac thanks to the M1.
I picked up a M1 Mac Mini. I honestly cannot tell the difference between a native and a non-native app on this thing. The Rosetta 2 emulation is mind blowing.
Conversely, I got an M1 machine for work and I've found that it's pretty useless unless your workload has been specifically tuned for it (like YouTube browsing or Twitter scrolling). There's no way in hell I'm using Rosetta to compile my x86 binaries, especially on a professional basis.
That's interesting. Xcode didn't require Rosetta for me. I also didn't have any issues installing Rosetta when I finally did need the functionality. Was this when the M1 was first released? I didn't have an M1 until August 2021.
You did mention above that 8.0 is now native M1, but you may still be quite right about the 7.1 version that is available for free download works using Rosetta 2 on the M1.
So far this has worked for me, and I'm able to get two full day's of battery life. I'm away from my desk far more frequently now.
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