Hacker News Reader

Comment by Niccizero | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the reason to buy a such a compromised machine over a X1 Carbon or a XPS 13. No ports, crappy soldered everything, worst company for consumer rights, etc. They have nice screens I guess? And you can't deny the brand appeal of the Apple logo.

View on HN

Macbook Air vs XPS 13

So right off the bat in trying to compare these computers Dell's site is leading me to 2 XPS 13s: the XPS 13 and the "New XPS 13". I'm going to assume new > old so I'll start with the "New XPS 13" which seems to be an XPS 13 9300.

Starting price winner: Macbook Air! $999 vs $1299.

So really the difference here is that Apple is selling a baseline i3 model with 256GB of SSD, while the base Dell is an i5 that's probably more similar to Apple's $1299 off-the-shelf option. Difference being by getting the better model Apple you also get double the SSD (512GB) while Dell is leaving you with 256GB. Which leads me to...

Storage: hard to call a winner. Dell's is similar to smaller for-the-price, but seems to be replaceable. Apple's disadvantage being a lack of upgradability, but higher amounts of it per dollar. Personal preference?

Memory: perfect tie, they both include 8GB of LPDDR4X at 3733MHz, and they're both soldered on-board.

Display: resolution win goes to Apple for including a 2560x1600 display while Dell's is only 1920x1200. Looks like Dell _does_ include some upgrade options for $100-300 if you want to go with a touch screen and/or get 3840x1200 worth of pixels.

Connectors: In count they're seemingly tied, 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack. Dell pulls ahead with the microSD card slot though. Bonus points for having a port on both sides of the laptop potentially simplifying would-be cable-messes that could come of single-sided ports.

Everything else seems pretty similar. Props to Apple for the touchId sensor -- similar props to Dell for including the IR camera for Windows Hello support.

I dunno, I'm looking pretty closely here and I don't think either of these machines are "compromised" in any meaningful way. Apple includes the MacOS license of course, while the Dell comes with a Windows license. User preference and all.

What you're missing is that the CPU in Dell is the U series, which has a base TDP of 15 watts and goes up to 25 watts if the cooling is good. The CPU in MB Air is a 10 watt Y series, which is really weak (MacBook 12" leve weak). So you get miles more performance in Dell. Judging by the lack of comments on the CPU difference, Apple is really successful in fooling the public into thinking that a MB Air i5 is the same as any other ultrabook i5, which it is not at all.

Dell's CPU: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196603/...

MB Air's CPU: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196589/...

Apple used to put the U-series CPUs into Air up until 2015, leaving the much more performant H-series for the Pro. But ever since the 2016 they now put the U-series into the 13" Pro while the Air gets a really weak CPU. They effectively shifted the performance one step up in pricing. While all the PC manufacturers stuck to using the U series in the air-like chassis,relegating the Y series to laptops that need to be very thin and light, and small tablets.

You're right that they _are_ using different classes of CPU -- I'd not initially been able to find solid info on what CPUs the new Air was using which was why I left it off.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that the Air CPU is "a really weak CPU" compared to the Dell one though... just to clear this up I mean that the i5-1030ng7 is slightly less capable than the i5-1035g1, but the difference isn't huge.

Here's a couple of geekbench results across those particular models that I found: looks like multi core performance _is_ notably better on the 1035g1, but the single core performance is only about 10% lower.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/1551286?baselin...

So with the new evidence of the comparative performance of the CPU available I feel like we're still basically at the same spot -- user preference. With a slight nod towards Dell for including a more performant CPU.

Huh, the benchmarks are similar, you're right! Very interesting, and the Dell's CPU has a suspiciously low base clock, too.

It'd be interesting to see some numbers on the sustained performance from both of those and I couldn't find any benchmark that measures this kind of performance.

I'm concerned because I know from experience that the 12-inch Macbook 2016 is horrible for anything serious while the contemporary Dell XPS 13 9350 is very versatile. For me the Macbook stayed at 800 MHz most of the time, which made it unusable, while the Dell maintained at least a 2 GHz clock. Those laptops, too, show very similar performance numbers in Geekbench -

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/1555969?baselin...

Which means Geekbench samples those bursty clocks on the Y-series that get up for tens of seconds at most.

And while it may seem like bursty loads are okay for the average user, I'd say the reality is more complex - I routinely see my wife leaving lots of tabs open in her browser, which leads to some CPU usage, and sometimes some sites just decide they need to run heavy Javascript, Facebook for example is quite heavy. As soon as this happens, the Y series laptop would throttle down and impact other work. I saw it myself on the 12-inch Macbook, and given how Apple skimped on the cooling solution for the 2018 Air, I think the 2020 model may be prone to this as well.

I definitely wish there was someone out there publishing like SPEC[1] test differences across various laptops -- would make for much more meaningful comparison than Geekbench scores, but that's the real advantage of Geekbench right now is that it's pretty easy to find samples across nearly every line of computer.

For what it's worth, the CPUs in those 12-inch Macbooks were pretty terrible. The base models were equipped with the M-series 4.5W chips. They had options for a couple of 7.5W chips, but even they didn't hold up in performance due to the lack of forced cooling on the 12-inch. I think 2017 is the last year they made them, and even its Geekbench score shows how underpowered it was: https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/423

I'm still definitely looking forward to seeing how the cooling solution holds up on the 2020 Air.

[1] - https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/

For the kinds of people who wouldn’t be running Linux on the other laptops, maybe they just like macOS better than Windows? It’s not like Hackintoshing is trivial. It’s not necessarily a developer machine.

This is pretty much it. OSX is what locks me in to Apple. Ironic that it (OSX) is free.

Nitpicking, but I wouldn't necessarily consider it "free". There is a cost to get it, which is the price of your Mac.

Fair point, although OSX can be installed on non-mac hardware (if one has the patience) or in a virtual host.

I haven’t checked recently, is Windows still available off-license?

Windows now has native Linux: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10, https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18534687/microsoft-windows...

Personally I just recently switched back to a Lenovo Yoga from a MBP and am much happier.

The X1 Carbon and XPS 13 both have soldered RAM.

The XPS 13 has no USB-A ports, the only port advantage is a microSD slot. I might remind you that SD cards have a huge speed disadvantage compared to USB 3.0/3.1 storage. It's somewhat low key, but I think SD cards are on the cusp of being obsolete and are already for many workflows.

"Worst company for customer rights" kind of conveniently forgets Lenovo's own missteps (Superfish).

Every time I compare Dell the comparison falls apart due to the lack of configurability. Want 16GB of RAM? Want the high DPI display? Congratulations, you must now buy the highest model, which has no price advantage over the Mac.

Sure, Apple is ripping you off by forcing you to buy their soldered storage (arguably, 99% of XPS buyers will never replace the storage themselves, either, or they'd have to pay a technician to do it), but at least they aren't gatekeeping the nice screen and RAM choice to the top model.

My partner has had a few airs over the years. Never once has she ever wanted to plug anything into any port, other than power. I think a lot of users are the same.

It's a very pretty facebook machine that she has never needed tech help for. I'll stick with my XPS 13 though.

A very expensive and overly complicated Facebook machine.

You seem to be trying very hard to avoid the obvious reason, and the reason most people buy Macs - to run macOS.

"Worst company for consumer rights" is a really big leap, too.

There are certainly reasons to prefer whatever an "X1 Carbon" or "XPS 13" may be over a MacBook. But I wouldn't exactly call the latter "compromised".

In fact, would the addition of whatever ports people want and the ability to switch the GPU (or whatever soldering prevents you from doing) not be the exact definition of a "compromise", i. e. turning a product that works excellently for some and not at all for others into one that is "meh, I guess" for everyone?

The X1 Carbon is the flagship ThinkPad model from Lenovo. The XPS 13 is a similar offering from Dell.

It's hard to take seriously the opinion of anyone who reduces the appeal of a computing environment to the logo on the lid.

So far they make the only laptops I can chuck down the stares over the course of 8 years and not skip a beat. Can't beat a solid slab of metal. The hardware is fine, price is certainly steep compared to the competition but it's scratch if I plan on owning this thing for a couple years.

Apple laptops are the de facto tool of silicon valley engineers and as a result they're the gold standard for developer toolchains

In short, macOS and hardware/software synergy.

For me OSX works better than Windows or desktop Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com