Comment by cronin101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cronin101 | Hacker News Reader

While this is entirely valid criticism, it glosses over the fact that the experiments were heavily biased towards long running workloads typical for media producers.

I'm not using my MBP to render 4k video or maxing all cores of the CPU for sustained periods.

It seems clear to me that for the casual/developer segment, that has eaten up the entire marketshare, having short bursts of peak performance on six cores is perfectly fine for compiling/coding/browsing workloads.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that sustained 100% cpu tasks should be run on portable hardware. Use remote desktop/SSH and a VM/Mac Pro if you need to hit maximum TDP for long periods, RDP has great in-house latency and has the added benefit of your lap not becoming lava.

There's a much better pattern for these tasks, and it isn't using hardware designed to be portable. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

> long running workloads typical for media producers

But aren't MBP's pitched at these types of users as the tool for this type of job? I mean, if you look at the blurb at https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ it's pretty much the selling point.

We may know better because we like to understand the underlying tech. But pretty much every content and media producer I've run into over the years isn't that interested. Pretty much in the same way that I'm really not that interested in how my old field engineer company motor's mechanicals work as long as it didn't break down 400 miles from home.

I agree that this is shady marketing.

However, like I said, there are superior solutions available for these content/media producers.

Am I supposed to feel bad for them not optimising a tool that is apparently critical for their throughput and suffering mediocrity as a result?

There's an information asymmetry here and if they don't put the effort in to squeeze extra performance out of their equipment then either:

A) Someone who is putting this minimal effort into actually choosing the best tool for their job will usurp them with greater productivity.

B) Render times really aren't a bottleneck compared to the struggle of coming up with content ideas/filming the actual content -- slightly longer running tasks while people slack off and drink coffee are just fine.

I suspect it's actually the latter hence this is really a non-issue.

You’re holding it wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com