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Comment by youdounderstand | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, SurfaceBook has a 15W TDP dual core CPU.

"To be fair" if I can observe at most a 10-15% difference on my primary CPU+IO bottleneck with power consumption on then I do not care much about the specifics of the underlying hardware.

Ironically, the only thing my MBP is better at is gaming.

>"To be fair" if I can observe at most a 10-15% difference on my primary CPU+IO bottleneck with power consumption on then I do not care much about the specifics of the underlying hardware.

To be fair, others dont have the same workflows, and see far greater than 10-15% CPU+IO improvements.

And people got enraged when the new MBPs wasn't that faster compared to last year. Imagine if it merely had that Surface cpu...

> To be fair, others dont have the same workflows,

""To be fair"" I don't think my workflow is exceptional for this environment. It varies from big compiles (android) to small compiles (webpack) and web work. It's quite normal for this audience, as far as I can ascertain.

But... I'm not sure why you are commanding me to imagine something here. I have 0 interest in imagining what excuses people make to keep or stop buying hardware from Apple.

I have my own reasons, and I've been pretty public with them. They extend well beyond recent hardware revisions, and have to do a lot more with software and the refusal to ship a touch screen.

>It's quite normal for this audience, as far as I can ascertain.

This audience isn't the only audience. Video processing/export pipelines, for one, show more than 10-20% improvement in Premiere, and close to 50-100% in FCPX in the new machines.

Your personal workflow isn't really a generally applicable benchmark, and if Apple had gone with the 15W TDP processor people would just have more ammunition for the "it's not pro enough" argument.

The Surface Book is probably a better choice for you, though. My workflow sounds pretty similar to yours (maybe not quite as heavy a background load, though I do some incremental compiling and whatnot), and I have the mid-spec 12" Macbook which routinely gives me 10+ hours of programming and web browsing (I use Opera with the adblocker and battery saver turned on). I simply didn't need more power; this little machine handles everything I throw at it. I think a lot of people fetishize computing power to the detriment of their own convenience.

> Your personal workflow isn't really a generally applicable benchmark,

On the contrary, I think many developers here would be interested in the actual difference observed as opposed to benchmarked. My workflow is unusual in the wider world, but compiling Clojure, running webpack, compiling Android executables with Gradle, and running ocaml's compiler are all somewhat unique to this sphere. I feel comfortable talking about it.

> I think a lot of people fetishize computing power to the detriment of their own convenience.

I agree with this. That's why I think my surface book is a good compromise. A nice medium of a lot of things, acceptable speed at standard tasks with excellent battery life, a touch laptop for when touch-centric work and usability arises, and for my eyes the nicest screen shipped on a laptop right now.

I've got an XPS13 with an i7-6500U. That CPU is surprisingly powerful. I tend to throw quite a bit of multi-core C++ compilation or heavy Java workloads against it and so far it hasn't noticeably faltered once. Don't underestimate them just because of the low TDP!

So does my Macbook pro 2016 =) The touchbar-less model.

I bought this model for the extra battery life. But I'm also far from impressed. It's my main complaint tbh.

I find that my typical usage which is on the heavier side (chrome, + 1hr of facetime) I get about 3.5 hrs battery life.

SurfaceBook is dual core, not quad core (but you'll be hard pressed to find this via any Microsoft marketing of surface - has only been confirmed by PR, no mention on any official press sites)

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