New Mac Mini M2 pro and WOW

[Kagthul]

Let's take a quick glance at my Steam library, to see all of my "iOS ports". Surely we won't see a lot of A-class indie games...

Disco Elysium
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Path of Exile
Dead Cells
Faster Than Light
Into The Breach
Loop Hero
Cuphead
Slay The Spire
Dont Starve
EVE Online
Hades
Hollow Knight
Inside
Stardew Valley
Undertale
Braid
The Witness
Hyperlight Drifter
Rust
Vampire Survivors
Ark: Survival Evolved

Maybe you just don't know what you are talking about?

Wow.. a compelling list of...

22 whole games.

Man. You told me.

Now lets look at my game library....

Hmmm...

Yep, a lot more than 22 games.

So, thank you for taking the time to prove my point for me. I appreciate it.

Again, im a Mac guy. Ive had a Mac longer than you've been a person. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground. If you care about gaming, and/or gaming is your hobby, you cant do it on a Mac.

Been that way since literally day 1 and it will not change.

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That's why path dependency is so destructive. It holds back progress by relegating potential advancements to niche corners. To go back to cars, if a serious effort was made in the 70s to get away from the internal combustion engine, we could have made the advancements, especially in infrastructure, that would have gotten us to a world where electric vehicles could fulfill industrial needs. We see this pattern over and over again with technology.

Electrical vehicles meeting industrial needs has nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the laws of physics.

Its energy denisty on batteries, nothing more, nothing less.

And given the OTHER uses for batteries in literally all aspects of life, its fair to say that battery technology isn't stunted because of lack of an EV push.

[BrokenRavens]

Wow.. a compelling list of...

22 whole games.

Man. You told me.

Now lets look at my game library....

Hmmm...

Yep, a lot more than 22 games.

So, thank you for taking the time to prove my point for me. I appreciate it.

Again, im a Mac guy. Ive had a Mac longer than you've been a person. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground. If you care about gaming, and/or gaming is your hobby, you cant do it on a Mac.

Been that way since literally day 1 and it will not change.

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Electrical vehicles meeting industrial needs has nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the laws of physics.

Its energy denisty on batteries, nothing more, nothing less.

And given the OTHER uses for batteries in literally all aspects of life, its fair to say that battery technology isn't stunted because of lack of an EV push.

LOL You know that is just the 22 games that guy has, right? He does not own all the Mac games ever made.

There is more than just those. For example the Warhammer: Total war series and Baldurs Gate 3, etc.

I mean I just listed a video about Mac games, Resident Evil 8, metro Exodus, Borderlands 3…

It’s not as extensive as the PC library (is anyone saying it is?), but it’s not just 22 games either. And many of them are graphically intensive.

[NineSpine]

Wow.. a compelling list of...

22 whole games.

Man. You told me.

Now lets look at my game library....

Hmmm...

Yep, a lot more than 22 games.

So, thank you for taking the time to prove my point for me. I appreciate it.

Again, im a Mac guy. Ive had a Mac longer than you've been a person. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground. If you care about gaming, and/or gaming is your hobby, you cant do it on a Mac.

Been that way since literally day 1 and it will not change.

Your argument was not that Windows has more games. Your argument was that the MacOS ecosystem for games was a barren wasteland of iOS ports. If it was, why does my list of games (which is just the 22 indie games I currently have installed) include most of the best A-tier indie games that have some out the last few years?

Pretending you are right after being so devastatingly proven wrong is an embarrassing defense tactic. Just admit you didn't realize that indie games are actually VERY commonly Mac-compatible. It's OK to admit you are wrong.

And please, pretending you are some grizzled veteran that the rest of us pale in comparison to is even more embarrassing, especially after you were so clearly proven wrong. Screaming "BUT IM OLD" doesn't magically make you right.

Electrical vehicles meeting industrial needs has nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the laws of physics.

Its energy denisty on batteries, nothing more, nothing less.

And given the OTHER uses for batteries in literally all aspects of life, its fair to say that battery technology isn't stunted because of lack of an EV push.

I'm very glad that the people who actually move technology forward in this world don't fold their arms and declare technological progress over every time they hit a hurdle.

Batteries for cars face specific challenges rarely seen for most types of batteries, such as weight and ability to withstand damage. Technology is generally going to trend where there is a problem to solve, so advancements to the battery technology in your phone may certainly help the technology broadly, it is not some binary where as long as someone is working on batteries for some application then the technology is progressing at the same speed and direction as is needed for all applications.

We are just now getting to serious alternatives to lithium batteries. We should be decades farther on this technology.

[NineSpine]

I don't think anyone disagrees with ARM being a better architecture, maybe disagreeing with your analogy given battery technology and the lack of nuclear power plants around the world but I digress.

x86 to ARM transition should be slow, the revolution of phones has already started that transition years ago. Windows has gotten ARM integration with the Surface Pro X product line and continues to get monthly updates. Its happening, but its not the 'ripping off the bandaid' that Apple can do to their entire ecosystem. That totalitarian style control that Apple has over their ecosystem has certain advantages when it comes to improving things (or making them worse).

Hey, Apple never makes anything worse. Remember that awesome touchpad above the keyboard?

I think that you aren't looking back far enough. We should have been in the process of phasing out x86 before 64 bit was even released.

[RobertMugabe]

Let's take a quick glance at my Steam library, to see all of my "iOS ports". Surely we won't see a lot of A-class indie games...

Disco Elysium
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Path of Exile
Dead Cells
Faster Than Light
Into The Breach
Loop Hero
Cuphead
Slay The Spire
Dont Starve
EVE Online
Hades
Hollow Knight
Inside
Stardew Valley
Undertale
Braid
The Witness
Hyperlight Drifter
Rust
Vampire Survivors
Ark: Survival Evolved

Maybe you just don't know what you are talking about?

Dude most of these games run on phones too. They are not high end except Ark and are in fact mostly indie phone games.

Or they are prev. gen. Not a great list to prove how great gaming on Mac is ngl. Better buy a switch or xbox if you wanna play and use the Mac for other stuff only.

[NineSpine]

Dude most of these games run on phones too. They are not high end except Ark

Did I say that these were graphically intensive games?

[RobertMugabe]

Did I say that these were graphically intensive games?

No but most of them are iOS ports

[NineSpine]

No but most of them are iOS ports

That's not true, but let's pretend it is: Did I say they weren't available on iOS?

Are you at all interested in any kind of productive conversation?

[NineSpine]

Its going to be hard to argue unless we start getting >64bit ARM processors or at least 64bit ARM processors on Windows with an advantage over just efficiency. It'll never happen if we don't see modular ARM processors like we do between AMD/Intel since I would assume people like us who build/maintain/troubleshoot systems would be the people to drive that transition.

Seeing Samsung's newest version of Dex on the S23 gets me excited, unforunately it doesn't have an 16x 4.0 PCIe slot to run an RTX 4090 though. I think we're likely to transition to mobile devices being turned into desktops and consuming the standard desktop than we are to see a windows based M1 mac mini like device happen. There's just no incentive, even if it can consume half of the power for the same task. Thermodynamics is the only reason I care for ARM since its still a limitation outside of lithographic/architectural improvements.

The RTX 4090 and its ridiculousness will never go away because even if they made an ARM processor that had a PCIe slot, GPU makers would still be pushing the power envelope and gaming PCs would likely turn more into GPU hosts than they already are.

I don't disagree, but the lack of incentive is the problem I'm pointing out.

[NineSpine]

Well that involves some of the most complex manufacturing humanity has ever created completely changing its systems to get a genuinely minor improvement. Intel spent from 2014 to 2020 on the same 14nm process because they could, let alone changing their entire fabrication's process without any real market pressure. If it were AMD or Intel, we'd likely see AMD make this change before Intel does simply because Intel has its own fabrication contrary to AMD's use of TSMC (who already makes ARM processors, but that's functionally irrelevant in this context). We'd also need to see it become mainstream in the mobile market where the advantages are more noticeable, beyond Microsoft's SQ1 DoA product.

I think we need to stop relying on markets to drive these kinds of changes.

[Nevarosx]

My 2020 Macbook Air M1 (no fan/graphics card) runs at least 60fps in every environment on decent settings. WoW doesn't take much to run tbh

[NineSpine]

Woh there partner, holster your communism before things get out of hand.

The technological progress of humanity cannot be relegated to what is going to make a rich person richer. This attitude holds us back over and over and over and over again, and that is not even considering the dangerous situations it creates or how externalized costs get put onto everyone else. Sometimes, it is in the public interest to move things along. This can be done in public institutions, but it can also be done by smashing large companies to induce competition. There isnt a single solution to the problem, but I don't think anyone should take "but it needs to make a rich person richer" as a serious argument against technological progress.

[dacoolist]

My 2020 Macbook Air M1 (no fan/graphics card) runs at least 60fps in every environment on decent settings. WoW doesn't take much to run tbh

I was super surprised when the m1 came out in late 2020, here at work we have access to them (fruit company lol) - but wow runs extremely well even on the cheapest unit. If you get an m2 max unit like the video posted before - thing runs extremely well. The thing that always made me wonder how the in the world: the no fans on the macbook air - I have no idea how that thing doesn't overheat lol

[RobertMugabe]

That's not true, but let's pretend it is: Did I say they weren't available on iOS?

Are you at all interested in any kind of productive conversation?

No what I mean is, while I do generally agree with your argument, I think that the list you've posted is (ironically) not very good as pretty much all of these games are bad examples. They are either actual iOS ports (which was part of your counter-argument to the other poster that they aren't) or they are very old games at this point, which a phone could probably even run to a certain degree if ported.

Still, Macs are capable of gaming when done properly and WoW is a good example of a native Mac game that works well, not on a "standard" M1/M2 CPU (not that it doesn't run at all, but not a satisfying resolution/settings/framerate), but on a M1/M2 Pro it runs moderately well, which is good enough for a thin laptop or very small PC (Mac Mini) IMO

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Well that involves some of the most complex manufacturing humanity has ever created completely changing its systems to get a genuinely minor improvement. Intel spent from 2014 to 2020 on the same 14nm process because they could, let alone changing their entire fabrication's process without any real market pressure. If it were AMD or Intel, we'd likely see AMD make this change before Intel does simply because Intel has its own fabrication contrary to AMD's use of TSMC (who already makes ARM processors, but that's functionally irrelevant in this context). We'd also need to see it become mainstream in the mobile market where the advantages are more noticeable, beyond Microsoft's SQ1 DoA product.

Microsoft's ARM Surfaces are anything but DoA... They are selling pretty well in that price category, Microsoft and Qualcomm keep on developing them and iirc they are still the best non-Apple ARM cpu you can get right now.

[NineSpine]

No what I mean is, while I do generally agree with your argument, I think that the list you've posted is (ironically) not very good as pretty much all of these games are bad examples. They are either actual iOS ports (which was part of your counter-argument to the other poster that they aren't) or they are very old games at this point, which a phone could probably even run to a certain degree if ported.

Still, Macs are capable of gaming when done properly and WoW is a good example of a native Mac game that works well, not on a "standard" M1/M2 CPU (not that it doesn't run at all, but not a satisfying resolution/settings/framerate), but on a M1/M2 Pro it runs moderately well, which is good enough for a thin laptop or very small PC (Mac Mini) IMO

I am genuinely baffled why we would say "Yes, it was a massively successful, influential, critically acclaimed, and popular game... but they ported it to iOS two years later so it doesn't count."

The idea that Disco Elysium or Hollow Knight are bad examples of "A-tier indie games" is just insane to me.

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The primary drives of innovation are competition and laziness. Either you're trying to get a leg up over something due to some external pressure like a market (war being one of those) or you're lazy and trying to make things easier. The obvious other way is to force it unnaturally.

Unnaturally? Markets are not natural occurrences. They are constructs we build.

Re-tooling microprocessor fabrication is incredibly complex and results in downtime, which they basically can't have to maintain the business. Its going to take a strong force in the market to force that kind of change and I'm hopeful the US domestic microprocessor fabrication will start off with a modern fabrication that can force the major fabrication facilities to re-tool for better lithography processes more often. TSMC so far has been the major player in that since they're down to 4nm consumer production with Nvidia's AD100 GPUs.

It doesn't have to take a strong force in the market. It can also take the government saying "do this" through some force, whether that is a direct command or by propping up competition.

Take our nuclear power technology for example. We stuck with light water reactors even though they are dramatically inefficient and less safe. Why? Because we built the infrastructure for nuclear subs first and that's where light water reactors are needed.

But if we invested in retooling the infrastructure, we would now have vastly safer and more efficient nuclear power capabilities. This failure to course correct has literally cost at a minimum hundreds of thousands of lives (not to mention the financial and environmental burdens) as we have had to use dirtier, less efficient technologies when we could have been using much more advanced nuclear technologies 50 years ago.

[NineSpine]

The top 1% of productive individuals will always find a way to maximize their potential, its the reality of the neigh insanity level productivity required to be a CEO that maybe 1% of humans, mostly men, are capable of sustaining. Not everyone is willing to work 100+ hours a week for their whole lives to reach that level, it's just an unreasonable level of productivity. The nature of humanity is those people will always exist and always seek power over others as an expression of their competence.

I'd rather those people run companies than run governments, otherwise that's how you get Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Hitler as examples. Those people didn't become authoritarians because they weren't within that top 1% of productive individuals, they continuously sought more influence and control in every layer they could've until they were the top dog for an entire nation. Someone of that capacity are the types to consolidate power and exert their control over every layer because they can probably do it better.

Those top 1% of productivity individuals are the reason the companies that've competed to produce better and better products which has created the advanced civilization we all enjoy today. The engineers and scientists can only do so much within the scope of their capacity, and really shouldn't be running companies anyways. Those companies are best run by those willing to take risks to win big with the productivity levels required to do so. Some of those engineers/scientists are those people and succeed at it, but its not the standard.

Research shows that CEOs don't actually do very much. Their impact on a company at any serious size is minimal as long as they don't screw it up. Furthermore, CEOs are tasked with two things:

1. Growth
2. Profit

And typically they are really only tasked with #1. They are not tasked with innovation, invention, or progress. In fact, their goal is to stifle those things in many cases, through acquisition of enough market power to render competition incapable of threatening them. That's why you see social media companies buy up every new platform before it can grow. They want to neutralize threats, not embrace competition and change.

The bottom line is that the goal of any large corporation is to externalize their costs onto other people and establish enough market power to not need to innovate. Having to innovate is their enemy. They want to get rid of it because it is a cost.

Also, the idea that Hitler and the capitalists were at odds is completely ahistorical. The business class loved Hitler, and he gave them massive amounts of power. In fact, top business leaders in the US were so impressed by Hitler that they tried to stage a coup in the US to establish fascism here, because of how good for powerful business interests fascism was. Fortunately, they picked General Smedley Butler to lead their coup, and he immediately reported them to congress. This is known as the Business Plot, and it is criminal how little it is taught to Americans.

[Linkedblade]

My 2020 Macbook Air M1 (no fan/graphics card) runs at least 60fps in every environment on decent settings. WoW doesn't take much to run tbh

None of the apple silicon devices have a graphics card. The graphics cores are part of the M1 silicon. Fyi.

And you're right wow doesn't take much to run. That's why the minimum specs are on 10 year old hardware: 4th gen intel with 4 cores, 8 GB ram, 128 GB storage, directx12 graphics with 3 GB vram like GTX 900 or Rx400 series.

Honestly since wow has a native port to arm, i'm surprised there isn't an android or ios app.

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<snip>

So, what exactly is the solution for research in areas you think are important? All this talk about politics, and I have seen a solution other than you complaining about capitalism or nazis or nation bashing the US.

Also, this isn't the politics forum. Nation bashing is against the rules.

This has gone quite a ways from discussing how well WoW runs on apple silicon.

[NineSpine]

None of the apple silicon devices have a graphics card. The graphics cores are part of the M1 silicon. Fyi.

And you're right wow doesn't take much to run. That's why the minimum specs are on 10 year old hardware: 4th gen intel with 4 cores, 8 GB ram, 128 GB storage, directx12 graphics with 3 GB vram like GTX 900 or Rx400 series.

Honestly since wow has a native port to arm, i'm surprised there isn't an android or ios app.

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So, what exactly is the solution for research in areas you think are important? All this talk about politics, and I have seen a solution other than you complaining about capitalism or nazis or nation bashing the US.

Also, this isn't the politics forum. Nation bashing is against the rules.

This has gone quite a ways from discussing how well WoW runs on apple silicon.

Nothing I have said is remotely close to nation bashing. And I didn't bring up capitalism or nazis. I responded to those issues being raised.

The solution has a few angles:

1. Significantly more public investment in R&D.
2. Stop being so ridiculously generous with intellectual property law to large corporations, especially when giving them publicly funded work to make money off of.
3. Heavy handed application of anti-trust law to generate a more fragmented market.
4. Incentivizing worker-owned cooperatives over privately owned firms.

[Linkedblade]

Nothing I have said is remotely close to nation bashing. And I didn't bring up capitalism or nazis. I responded to those issues being raised.

The solution has a few angles:

1. Significantly more public investment in R&D.
2. Stop being so ridiculously generous with intellectual property law to large corporations, especially when giving them publicly funded work to make money off of.
3. Heavy handed application of anti-trust law to generate a more fragmented market.
4. Incentivizing worker-owned cooperatives over privately owned firms.

Again, your solution to capitalism/cronyism is more government. Which is complaining about a problem, with no solution. You're just telling the government to make a solution. That fixes nothing. And it definitely doesn't get funds to anyone doing research.

Also again, not a politics forum.

Do you have anything to add about arm or apple silicon or hardware that runs wow?

[NineSpine]

Not every company's CEO is the same, a CEO can fundamentally change the direction of a company to improve its profitability and growth. A beautiful example of this is what happened to LEGO when they got their first non family CEO and practically saved the company.

I didn't say every company's CEO is the same, but Lego is a pretty awful pick for you to make your case about innovation. Their success under Knudstorp was basically to stop innovating and to only double down on markets where there was no competition. Innovation was bankrupting the company, because as I said above, innovation is not the same thing as making money. In fact, it is often the enemy of making money.

Also, the details of the restructuring of Lego are quite interesting. You were looking at a top-heavy company littered with nepotism that got turned into a lean company that put all the power in the hands of the workers to control the actual product direction. Knudstorp's primary method of success was getting out of the way of the productive people, the workers.

So, again, this is not the best example for you to pick, because it is actually about exactly what I said earlier: A CEO staying out of the way, which is generally the best thing they can do.

Regarding your comment about businesses loving Hitler, I don't see how describing Hitler as the type of top 1% productive individuals who sought power over other to exert competence is ahistorical to him getting cozzying with the other top 1% productive individuals. I wouldn't have described them 'at odds' so I'm not sure where you derived that thought.

The point is that you are arguing that we need to defer to this mythic top 1% that does all the production, or else we end up with fascism, when in reality your precious 1% is exactly who drives societies into fascism.

So CEOs are the lazy or average productivity individuals who eventually become the top and can now dictate how much effort they apply? I think you're missing the point regarding the pre-requisites to becoming a CEO and the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO.

I'm very confident I understand this better than you. Two of my masters' degrees are in History and Economics, and for them I wrote a dual dissertation that was a comparative analysis of the history of corporate governance and structure in the US and Europe in the 20th century. I also spent just shy of a decade of my life working as a consultant primarily for large corporations, dealing directly with executive leadership and boards, and most of that was spent running my own small firm.

Does this mean I'm right about everything? No, but it does mean you shouldn't tell me what I understand and don't understand. Now let me tell you why I left that awful career to go do other jobs that paid a lot less:

Those people are by and large the most incompetent people you will ever meet in your entire life. Half of them are in their positions because daddy got them there, especially when it comes to who sits on boards. It's a big nepotistic circle jerk, and very rarely do any of these people have a single fucking clue what their companies actually do. Some of these people can't dress themselves without assistance.

This is not always the case. Smaller corporations can be radically different, especially if they are run by the founder(s). I use what I call the "name test". Once a company is so big that the c levels can't name half their employees, that is about where the change happens. That is when a company typically transitions away from being an entity that provides goods and/or services and into something else: A complex financial entity. Sometimes founders can avoid this happening if they really care about the product (Steve Jobs comes to mind), but that is the exception, not the rule.

Why do you think German engineering is still so highly regarded? Because German law is that most large corporations have to give the workers a nearly equal share at the table for running the company. The workers know what the company does, how to improve it, how the products work, what would make them better, etc.. The corporate governance is typically absolutely fucking clueless about any of those things. They know one thing: How to manipulate the complex financial instrument in order to extract short term gains. That's it, and half of them are too stupid to even do that properly because they grew up in fantasy worlds their absurdly wealthy parents built for them, and then daddy got them jobs. Most of these people *start* their careers as VP of a department after they drunkenly stumble their way through a college their daddy bought them into. They don't work their way up. They start on third base and then fail their way to home base by giving favors to each other.

Working with these people is an absolute fucking nightmare. I primarily assisted companies who were trying to move into Arabic-speaking nations. Do you know how many times I had to stop some idiot board member from making a camel-related joke? It's more than once. It was constant damage control. Rule 1 whenever we were setting up meetings with important contacts was "How few people above VP level can we have in the meeting?" because the more were there the less productive a meeting was, almost universally, especially if board members insisted on being involved.

Imagine that you go into a meeting. This meeting is for a company that produces chemicals and they are meeting with local government leaders in a small country that is considering letting them build a factory near a residential area. Now imagine the local government leaders start asking questions about safety studies, and then every single person from the company not only doesn't know anything about the safety studies being referenced, but is so disconnected from the actual business that they don't even know what the chemical is. They can't name one actual chemical the company produces. They only know them by internal names that they see on financial documents. And then the deal evaporates. I can tell you dozens of stories like this, and I cannot tell you a single example where someone lost their job as a result, no matter how big the deal was. Why? Because you can't kick Steve out of the company if he appointed your wife to his charity, and then using that leverage she appointed another friend's wife and that got her a position on the board of another company and on and on and on.

But I can tell you a dozen stories of regular workers who made minor slip ups during meetings and were canned the next day, even when in the same meeting the higher ups nuked the entire deal with far worse conduct and ineptitude.

If you want a genuine example that you can go out and see, look at Elon Musk's embarrassing Twitter chat session where actual engineers started asking him basic questions about Twitter's infrastructure, and he gets upset like a child because he can't answer anything, because he doesn't know anything about modern software.

And these are the people you are telling me are the 1% most productive people in the world who drive all innovation? I'm sorry, but this is not how the real world works.

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Again, your solution to capitalism/cronyism is more government. Which is complaining about a problem, with no solution. You're just telling the government to make a solution. That fixes nothing. And it definitely doesn't get funds to anyone doing research.

Also again, not a politics forum.

Do you have anything to add about arm or apple silicon or hardware that runs wow?

Correct, my solution to organize the economy better is going to involve the government, which is the entity that organizes the economy. You got me.

I said to give more money to researchers and you told me my idea doesn't get funds to anyone doing research. If you don't feel confident actually critiquing my ideas, just admit it, don't lie just to avoid it.