The OWC RocketYard Blog has a really interesting article on how the new M1 Macs actually have 2 thunderbolt busses even though they only have 2 ports. This is unlike previous Thunderbolt macs which had 4 thunderbolt ports, but only 2 busses, with 2 ports split on each bus. The new M1 Macs have only 2 ports but 2 busses, and with the new ability to use USB4 Hubs to split thunderbolt you can have the more ports.
Woohooo! Softraid has publicly release it’s SoftRaid 6 beta with support for Big Sur and M1 Macs! This is huge news, as I can never move to an operating system until SoftRaid supports it, as I can’t work without my RAID.
And it already has the Final Release of the SoftRaid Version 6 Driver included, so a RAID should be fully supported.
SoftRaid is mandatory for a RAID on a mac, so I could not be more happy about this.
And they are working on M1 support, but it obviously couldn’t be out with development Macs as they didn’t include thunderbolt ports, so you couldn’t test thunderbolt connectivity, but are working on it now.
AppleInsider has an article on how the new M1 Macs in fact support USB 4, and not just Thunderbolt 3. I hadn’t realized this at all, but it makes sense as it is new open standard, but amazing that it is before Intel managed to release it. They do need to add more ports though, 2 ports on the laptops when it includes charging is nuts. I have problems with only 4 thunderbolt 3 ports on my imac pro as is.
I still hope for external graphics card support in the MacPro, but think it is less and less likely that will happen, but maybe I will pleasantly surprised. And if not just how much memory will a pro need to run the graphics and system memory? And it won’t be expandable, you are stuck with what you buy.
Apple has released it’s first 3 Macs with the M1 chip it is designing itself making for the 2nd processor transition in the history of the mac and the first ARM based Macs, now on the same platform as the ipad and iPhone.
Apple’s stats make it look really fast and the first benchmarks make it a very impressive machine and 3 of the fastest macs apple has every released.
Of course for now it is useless to me as Adobe software does not yet run or at least run well under Rosetta. Still the performance of Final Cut Pro sounds impressive and I love that the latest beta of DaVinci Resolve 17.1 runs on M1 Macs already. And Adobe has a beta of Photoshop out as well.
What scares me is the single thunderbolt channel and only 2 ports and the fact that it can’t run an external graphic card even with it’s thunderbolt port.
And what is even scarier for me is that the M1 shares it’s memory between the graphics card and the onboard memory. So you had better get the 16GB because you are sharing them with the video processing. If this continues you will need to really get more RAM on high end machines (which hopefully won’t top out at 16GB as the current machines do.
Still the processors do have impressive performance already so the higher end version will likely be very impressive.
And it is amazing that basically the MacBook Air is only different in a single GPU core being disabled, and the MacBook Pro and Mini having fans to cool the system down.
I look forward to what the truly pro Apple M1 Machines will look like, but I don’t look forward to the software update cost that will go along with it, and the software that will break and end up going by the wayside.