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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

I develop on a macbook pro for 12 hours a day. Have a bajillion chrome tabs open, 2-3 ides open, sequel pro, photoshop, slack/skype, utorrent, spotify, and more....

My macbook pro 2016 i7/16G doesn't even skip a beat.

Unless you're doing 3d graphics or Machine Learning or something...I think for 99.9999999% of POWER USERS a throttled i9 with 32 gigs of RAM is plenty for the year 2018.

This throttle issue in my opinion is such a minor quibble it feels like demonization of Mac.

You can focus on the very very very few negatives of Macbooks but in my opinion at the end of the day it's an incredible machine.

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I think the main quibble is that the laptop can't even hold it's base clock speed without throttling.

Under sustained load. That's the key part here.

Yeah but that's like buying a race car and being upset that it's throttled at 300 mph.

99.9999% of people will never go 300mph..unless you're using it in a very specialized way.

But it's supposedly _slower_ than its predecessor in sustained situations like this. What's the point of having a "more powerful" 2018 machine over the 2017 if, when trying to use that power, you end up worse off?

For most users, sacrificing some sustained performance for the sake of higher burst performance is absolutely the right choice if such a tradeoff is possible. People who keep the CPU at 100% with a multi-threaded workload for minutes on end have a workload that requires a desktop form factor. For the other 97% of users, the CPU will spend far more time idle than fully-loaded.

If you spending 400$ to upgrade from an i7 to an i9, you are expecting i9 performance. If the i9 throttles, you are not getting that performance.

Yeah but I don't think buying a race car and use it to race should be considered as "using it in a very specialized way".

I think the better car analogy here would be buying an expensive luxury sports car and being disappointed that it couldn't keep pace with a real race car on the track.

No laptop can be an equal to a real workstation unless you don't actually need a workstation to begin with.

Or buying something like a Corvette Z06, taking it to the track, and realizing they go into limp mode if you try to hot lap the thing if you're a decent driver... and this is a real thing, they do.

No it's like buying a truck for your business and being upset when it can't tow its advertised load.

Apple didn't advertise a minimum time guaranteed to sustain 2.9ghz with 100% load.

It's not much different than my iPhone shutting down after recording 4k60 video for 2 minutes in the hot summer sun at 110F degrees (in fact, that's actually more frustrating than this Macbook "issue" but there was no outrage for that).

It's like buying a chinook to tow a skateboard then being upset that the chinook can't go it's full 200 mph.

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