Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
I also got an M1 Max. The chip is amazing. Compile times are a <i>lot</i> faster than on the 6 core Intel Mac mini I had before.<p>But at this point it's really held back by Apple's software.<p>Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60 seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator whatsoever.<p>Apps randomly take 20 seconds to launch, maybe because of [1]?<p>The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show.<p>ControlCenter using 8GB of RAM to show a few sliders (I hope they fix that bug soon).<p>The scanning feature in Preview is so unreliable that I started using my Windows machine for scanning something on my HP all-in-one.<p>Some of those problems may be issues with 3rd party software (drivers), and others are just things that slipped through QA, and will hopefully be fixed in an update.<p>But some of the issues are structural issues, where Apple has made questionable decisions that means issues can never be fixed.<p>Eg. designing a security architecture that requires synchronously checking a binary signature during app startup with a web service is bound to cause performance issues.<p>Or the design of the XPC system, which uses asynchronous message passing between services that are implicitly launched on demand sounds nice in theory, but it has been the source of so many bugs, causing temporary or permanent app hangs that are impossible to debug. The system was introduced in macOS 10.7 (!) and it still doesn't work reliably! At this point I've lost hope it will ever work properly.<p>[1]: <a href="https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-design/" rel="nofollow">https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-d...</a>