The $1,799 MacBook Pro 13 vs. the $650 Acer Swift 3 | Hacker News Reader

The $1,799 MacBook Pro 13 vs. the $650 Acer Swift 3

pcworld.com

47 pointstomerbd86 comments

It's not just a case of dividing performance numbers by price - obviously the Apple machine is better built. The real question is: Is it built a $1000 dollars better and built well enough to overcome the fact it's slower (in these tests)?

There are some pretty legitimate reasons to come away from Apple products now in my opinion, including some very competitive hardware at lower prices. I've been quite a happy Linux user for a long time now.

Not only are they better built, they also run macOS.

I upgraded from a 2015 MacBook Pro to a 2019 16”. I heard there were tons of keyboard issues in the years in between. Aside from that, I stick with MacBooks because of the solid quality and macOS. I can’t work on Windows. I’ve tried again and again. I do have a windows machine for gaming, but programming and design work, the short cuts, fluidity, and general experience working in iTerm2 with multiple desktops is top notch. There’s nothing really to “fix” or make better. All my software on macOS is also top quality. I don’t know of a replacement for Omnigraffle or Omnifocus.

I had a recent fun project where I needed to install Python and a bunch of Python tooling and libraries (Jupyter, matplotlib, numpy, pandas, etc). Setting PATH on Windows is one of the most bizarre things. And even then I could not get everything to work. There were weird version conflicts, and this was all trying to use the Linux Subsystem for Windows which was insanely slow.

Why can’t I just update one file on my file system from a text editor to update path configuration?

WSL2 is fast, rock-solid and outperforms a Mac with iterm2 by far. I don't know which fluidity you mean on a multi montior setup you lack on Windows. Re short-cuts Windows has more (just think of win+number or built in window management) or autohotkey which owns karabiner. MacOs is good if you need Xcode but other than that? Idk

> WSL2 is fast, rock-solid and outperforms a Mac with iterm2 by far.

You have benchmarks for this? I’m running a Windows Pro installation with a Core i7 4790K and 16GB memory. My 2015 MacBook is much faster. I honestly thought the WSL thing was just a gimmick and some online searching told me that there are IO performance issues.

No benchmarks but I had never issues with WSL2. I on a 8550u with 8gb.

I was curious if I was using an older version that led to my problems with WSL2, but I just did a search right now for “WSL 2 slow” on Google. I see threads and discussions in the past couple months with people still calling out how slow it is and other issues.

Seems to be around how some people are using filesystem heavily. For iterm2 style use its great

Keep in mind that Wsl2 barely came out of public beta so obviously it will have online comments about performance issues when compared with products that don't have a public beta. And yet if you search for it you can find a lot of hits on macos bad performance. Not saying either is better just that the metric you set is inaccurate.

Omni focus web app seems to work just fine for me. I love the ios version - never tried Mac

With with version Catalina OSX becoming more and more like IOS. More restricted system and it is a lot buggy than previous versions. Personally i dont think i will continue with macOS in my next laptop.

> Not only are they better built

In this case, but there are plenty of examples of a sub-par performance from Apple. Broken keyboards, display cable issues, shipping with overheating CPU profiles, removing buttons, useless touch bar display, removal of ports - to name a few. As Rossman says: "the only part on a MacBook that doesn't blow are the fuses".

> they also run macOS

Again, not been a fan of their recent work. I can get a very macOS-esque experience in Linux. It's not always a seamless experience granted, but it's really quite acceptable.

> I can get a very macOS-esque experience in Linux.

The problem is the “can get.” If you value your time at, say, $200/hr, how long can you spend learning about Linux distros, repos, software, and troubleshooting issues etc before you’ve spent the savings from buying a non-Mac-native laptop?

If you value your time like that you might as well sleep 2h less and earn 400$ every night.

This is not a fair comparison because there are a lot of benefits of troubleshooting, most of them intangible. If you don't like it fine, just get a Linux "certified" laptop or a Mac.

I responded to a person saying that he could, with enough time, make Linux like Mac OS. I'm saying it's not worth the time for many people, might as well just buy a Mac OS native laptop.

I don't see how buying a Linux "certified" laptop figures into this - they aren't "mac-like." And I agree with you, just buy a Mac if that's what you're looking for.

> with enough time

I wouldn't want to overstate the effort, we're talking a day at most. The reward is a machine that you have a high amount of control over.

How much time have you spent working around MacOS bullshit?

> If you value your time at, say, $200/hr, how long can you spend learning about Linux distros, repos, software,

A lot of software people already understand linux; obviously if you have to learn everything from scratch it's not the ideal productivity choice.

I'm no Linux newbie. I've run Debian servers for many years, and I set up my first Linux box circa 1997.

But if my two options are buying a Mac native laptop or spending the time trying to set up a "mac-like" experience on a Linux distro installed on an Acer laptop designed for Windows (the comment I was replying to), I'm going with the Mac native laptop.

The learning curve really isn't bad from Unix to Unix OSes and any of the additional stuff is really no different from the undertaking for learning about macOS.

You propose it's costing you $200 per hour, but actually you're also gaining real skills too that you may have otherwise paid for. Once you have a decent setup you really don't spend much time learning anything additional.

If you run into issues, there is a wealth of help out there and if you really get stuck you can simply peek under the hood, even make some changes.

> Not only are they better built

This could be true about some models some time ago. The unibody design is now common among other brands and is not a particularly good thing - the two components that wear out most on laptops is the battery and the keyboard, and traditionally on non-Apple laptops you could at least replace the former yourself.

Better built is an objectively better. Having OSX is not. It's only better if you actually think OSX is the best OS.

A title like this sells. I'd love to see the author answer why Acer themselves sell much more expensive Intel based laptops.

My biggest one is that Apple seems to have let the privacy ship sail away in current versions of macOS: even with Siri, Location Services, iCloud, FaceTime, iMessage, App Analytics/reporting, Software Updates, ntp, and the App Store, all disabled, the thing still phones back home to Apple like mad. Little Snitch (with the disablement of built in Apple service whitelisting rules) is essential for basic operation of a private/secure blank macOS install (which is sad and frustrating after spending most of $6000 on a laptop).

I will probably remain on Apple hardware as long as their boot security can be disabled to boot other OSes (and Linux hackers continue to put in the work to support their weird T2-mediated NVMe flash) simply due to build quality, but should they go too far off the “can still boot and use normal, open source, auditable crypto software” track I’ll be forced to switch to something of lower quality like something from Purism.

I've been using Apple laptops since the G4 Ti Powerbook (in ~2003 I think) - and have generally been on a ~2-4 year upgrade cycle. Last February (~15mo ago) I went from my 2015 13" MBP to a new Macbook Air - they had touch ID, no touchbar, I didn't mind the keyboard and the performance with similar to the old MBP I had.

Now I'm not sure if it's Catalina or the hardware itself - but this machine became almost unusably slow, coupled with some issue where it would not hold a charge - I would routinely open it up in the morning and it would give me the dead battery icon. On this particular issue I tried to dig into it, and something was waking it from sleep every ~5 minutes or so - it was quite evident on the power usage graph, and I found some others online with similar stories.

And even on top of this the machine would occasionally panic and reboot - I don't think I ever saw my old MBP do that, and I'm unsure if this is a function of the hardware or the OS update.

Either way I got pretty frustrated with it, as it had moved into the realm of how I remembered linux laptops - a month ago I finally made the call to get ride of it (read: give it to the wife) and get a new laptop.

I picked up a dell xps13, turned off the touchscreen in the bios and loaded up my debian netinst and began the process. Immediately I was hit with the wifi in this device needing the non-free drivers sigh just like I remember installing linux on a laptop...

Either way, I got it done and I'm actually really happy with the outcome - most things just work (wifi, media keys, keyboard backlight) straight out of the box - the only thing lacking is the fingerprint reader, which apparently Dell is releasing drivers for. The thing isn't perfect - battery life is ~5-6 hours (firefox, editor, terminals) where I think I was getting 8-9 at least on the MBA, and this is far from the advertised time under Windows.

So all in all, I feel that there has been a significant decline in the experience on Apple hardware over the last couple of years - as I said above I'm not sure if this is hardware, software or both. Another anecdata point: the wife picked up a new iMac when they were released pre-Catalina - she loved it, however after the Catalina update she has had endless problems - the filesystem reporting different amounts of free space depending on how you view it, Photos not loading, the iTunes migration has caused endless headaches... So whilst I'm unsure of the hardware quality, I'm sure this is in part due to the changes in Catalina.

> I picked up a dell xps13

How’s the trackpad ?

This image on Acer's Swift product page really answered the question for me.

https://static.acer.com/up/Resource/Acer/Laptops/Swift_7/Ove...

That is hilarious.

Those have to be (part) owners of Acer Inc.

On a separate note, the Swift 3 is $49 cheaper than the Mac Pro wheels.

They dislike their Acers a lot and instead prefers time spent on phone or looking away through window.

You'd be laughed our of Teterborough if you whipped out your Acer once you get on the plane

I think instead of drawing any unnecessary conclusions about MacBooks or this particular Acer laptop, it simply shows just how much ground AMD has gained in comparison to Intel. This performance is just impressive, not just at this price point, and as far as I’m aware AMD chips are now beating Intel chips across the entire CPU lineup

I wonder how many AMD equipped Macs are there in Apple’s lab and how they perform. I know there are hackintosh out there too but Apple please do some validations and let there be choices.

I love these articles because the writers are so earnest and seem to be oblivious to the fact that buyers do not care.

I wouldn't presume to speak for everyone, but in my case particularly e.g. when making the leap back to PC away from macs, I poured over maybe 100 of this kind of review before settling on a final choice

If people weren't reading those articles the writers would not be incentivized to write them in the first place.

My sister, sister in law, and elderly parent all want new laptops this year. They are somewhat tech literate but not that interested in tech or computers. They asked me for advice on what to purchase and the only thing they cared about was which apple product was cheapest but still fast enough to use the programs they needed. Other platforms never even entered into the conversation.

They care, its just perfomance is only one of many factors that people consider when they buy a laptop. Screen quality, customer support, resale value, sad speed and many many others.

“X laptop which is cheaper than a MacBook benches higher”

This is not news, this has always been true. People keep buying MacBooks, it’s been one of the best selling laptops for a decade. There must be some other reason why people like them.... Maybe benchmarks don’t matter to most people? Really makes you think

Or, rather, "X laptop which is cheaper than premium laptop Y benches higher".

Which also isn't news. It's trivial to find a laptop that outperforms a premium laptop at half the price. That's equally true of any non-Apple vendor that has premium business laptop models.

The Acer Swift is limited to only 8GB of (non-upgrade) ram, which is a deal breaker for most developers. I also wonder about that Wi-Fi 6 chip and its Linux support. If it wasn't for those factors, I'd probably get one.

I wonder how much money non-upgradable RAM actually saves.

I wonder if it's mainly an issue of finding empty space for it.

Not much. Probably less to do with saving money and more about locking you into a specific amount of RAM. That way you spend the extra schmeckles in the first place rather than upgrading the machine yourself 2 years down the line.

It is also space. Non-upgradable ram can be put on when the circuit board is assembled, by robot. Upgradable ram has the socket installed in the same process, but then needs the ram put into the socket by low cost workers.

But as I said, space is likely the biggest reason.

In this instance, both laptops use LPDDR4x, which doesn’t exist in stick form. DDR4 SO-DIMM sockets are a challenge to fit though, so most OEMs take the easy path and go with soldered RAM there anyway.

This is totally an aside, and probably shows how out of touch I am, but there must be developers who need 8+ GB, and others who don't. I was always under the impression that things like editors and compilers didn't need a lot of computing performance. So I'm curious what kinds of development demand more performance. Is it a hard wall that you hit, or more of just a progressive degradation of performance?

The kind that requires you to collaborate on Slack.

I certainly won't defend Slack's RAM usage, but assuming only people doing certain sorts of work use it - or rather work at a company that uses it - is just ill-informed.

Slack works fairly well in the browser, if you have one that’s not a resource hog.

It does until you need to do video calls. Then it tells you to either download Chrome or download the Slack app aka Chrome. :(

People actually use Slack for calling? Color me surprised…

I routinely go over 10GB of ram with a bunch of chrome tabs, IDE windows, Spotify, chat app, outlook, etc... It's really not hard.

I was using 8GB until recently. It was hell because I was always swapping. Even with an SSD, the lag changing apps was painful.

I routinely run several VMs and my next laptop soon will be 32 or 64GB. On Windows my dev machine already uses 8GB with just a few browser tabs open.

“Uses 8 GB” doesn’t mean you can’t do more with it; your computer is just “using“ the RAM because it’s there.

I know that. However, running my configuration on an 8GB machine is horribly slow.

I've been lately working with a lot of F# (thus its compiler and Rider IDE) and my take on “more powerful machines for development” is that it's quality of life improvement. When intellisense (or whatever it's called in different circles) works instantly, as well as go to definition, find usages, etc: it's just so much better than waiting even a second for those actions.

There's another side in need of compiling large projects regularly, which I didn't encounter much, but if my newest MBP with i9 took around 20 minutes to compile haskell-ide-engine, I imagine what compile times you can hit potentially in bigger projects and how unbearable it could be on any less powerful machines.

I do all my work off a MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM. It can get a little tight if I have more than a few dozen browser windows open while also working in Xcode but usually it’s not bad for most of my work. Maybe I’ll grab a 16 GB model when I upgrade in a few years.

The killer is (lots of) Docker containers. My work MBP has 16 GB of RAM and at times I'm running a dozen Docker containers, 1-2 IDEs, a couple Chrome tabs, and Slack. I don't usually hit 16 GB, but I do go significantly past 8 GB.

This is for (very large) web app(s).

At least on the mobile dev side, the only two platforms with enough users to matter are Apple and Google. I'm typing on a 64GB machine and Xcode takes 30 minutes to do a clean compile, and the CPU is pegged at 100% all day as it "indexes" - something it does afresh every build and never manages to finish. You can disable indexing, but then lose a lot of code assist and have to constantly lookup class names and method names instead of having them auto-complete.

Android Studio is worse. Sometimes when AS is locked up for one of its ten minute fits I'll kill it and fire it up in power saving mode which is usable, but then there's no code assist, or I'll just open up Sublime and bet on writing my code perfectly enough to compile without mistakes, which is a big time penalty.

Popular theory here is that Apple and Google have even more fancy work stations, so they don't write their IDEs to run reasonably on ours. So I'd consider 8GB to completely unusable as a mobile dev or a popular 100-200MB size app. You may be right about editors and compilers, but these are IDEs.

For example, at my work, I create windows (WPF & WinForms) apps with Visual Studio. I usually have at least 2 instances of VS open, each using 1-2gb of ram. Combine that with Outlook, Slack and some more programs, and you are really feel everything slow down.

It's not that the system is unusable, it is just really slow, and that really hurts usability.

Any kind of major Java development can eat up gigabytes of RAM easily.

You're right that editors and compilers don't necessarily require a lot of computational power, so programming doesn't necessarily require a computational powerhouse. However, lots of professional development (or the majority of it?) is nowadays done with an IDE rather than with just an editor and a compiler, and full-featured IDEs tend to be heavier especially in terms of RAM. Also, compilation can take significant time if the project is large.

My current no-GUI hobby project written in C takes about half a second to compile from scratch on my laptop, but build times of 10 to 60 seconds aren't uncommon for Java web application projects.

As for memory, a major IDE used e.g. in Java development might gulp down a GB or two depending on your project, or on whether you need to have multiple projects open at the same time, etc.

In case of server-side Java development, you'll be deploying the software on an application server or at least using a Java-based web application framework of some kind. If your software is large or you happen to be using a heavyweight application server, this might take up anything from a few hundred MB to something in the gigabyte range.

Mobile developers aren't deploying on application servers, but I suppose they also need to be running some kind of a phone simulator or something to run their apps.

If you need a virtual machine e.g. for testing on a different OS, that's going to have an overhead of a few hundred MB per VM.

Add in a browser that tends to have quite a lot of tabs open (because you usually have at least a few tabs open for reading basic documentation or specifications, plus whatever other information you need to be looking for in your current technological rabbit hole), and that can take a couple of GB, too. That's of course in no particular way specific to software development, but it does add up.

So, to pull some numbers out of a hat:

- base operating system: ~1.5 GB

- an IDE: ~1.5 GB

- an application server or other platform for test deployments: 1 GB

- browser with a bunch of tabs open: ~2.5 GB

- a virtual machine, or some kind of a background service running in a container: 1 GB

That's already 7.5 GB for a project that's not necessarily even huge. Assuming you've got 8 GB of RAM, that leaves only 0.5 GB for everything else (assuming no swapping).

Running out of RAM isn't a hard wall, at least not for most development, but it could slow down e.g. compiles of large projects if there isn't enough free memory left for a nice amount of disk cache. I wouldn't mind developing on 8 GB provided that the projects aren't that large and that there's a fast SSD, but having more may have its benefits.

Java is of course notorious for its memory use, so some developers using more lightweight platforms might have a different experience. Of course if they happen to need any other memory-hungry tools or services running on their local machine, that could again change things.

TL;DR: Editors can be lightweight, and compilers can compile a small-ish codebase quickly. The complexity of the tools and infrastructure used for professional development often changes that.

I've purchased an Acer Swift 3 (the Intel version) with 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 3:2 screen (which I prefer) but it was 1000€, not $650.

The macbook pro is not competing with the Acer swift. A lot fo people buy for the OS, which Acer doesn't have, and the brand/build quality, which acer doesnt have. For a lot of people, the benchmarks might be among the last thing they care about. The laptops the acer swift 3 should terrify are other 700 dollar windows laptops without the ryzen and as well as any highly premium windows laptops with customers that pay for benchmarks, where eyes might start to wander if, say, the next XPS can't beat a 650 buck acer on benchmarks.

Not only that, but not as many Mac users are gaming on their laptop, which is a strong reason to need good benchmarks. If I'm buying a laptop it's really the user experience and battery life that I care about. Any CPU heavy tasks I can do on my desktop computer or an EC2 instance.

By the way, I assume this article is partly about gaming because of the preview image, but I was unable to read it on mobile thanks to all the popups.

I agree that what matters most is UX and battery life, but these are not fixed and are actually pretty malleable, otherwise the only thing that would beat a mbp could only be next year's mbp.

I had a laptop with terrible battery (desktop replacement) and it was great for my use. I also have a xps13 and it's great. I also had a mbp15 and it was great too. As you guessed, I had a different use case for each.

If I had to spend my money, would probably be the Acer as long as battery was ok.

Two things:

First, this is not about Apple, but rather about Intel. The 10th gen chips are very expensive, but they can't compete with AMD offer and this should be pretty clear to everyone right now. Anyway, this isn't just true for the MBP: we could make the same article for pretty much every premium laptop that uses Intel instead of AMD such as the Dell XPS, the X1 Carbon, the MS Surface Laptop/Book.

Secondly, what really matters in a laptop is the cooling system. Geekbench is nice to get a general idea of what a chip is capable of, but to understand how much the laptop can take advantage of it, you should run some stress tests. In this scenario, the base MBP can sustain ~25W while the higher end model goes up to ~30W. Most laptops in this category limit the chip to ~15W and sometimes they have to go even lower than that. I'm not saying that the Swift will be bad, but Geekbench doesn't really say much about that.

So sure, every occasion is good to scream "Apple bad", but this really isn't surprising

These posts are obnoxious. People don't buy Macs b/c of their impressive tech specs - they buy them b/c of macOS.

I don't know why you're being downvoted; this is true for a number of reasons.

1. Used to mac only software or workflow 2. ercieved supramacy in security 3. Ios compatibility 4. etc

The price/ hardware spec ratio by and large always goes to Windows boxes, but for many people the change in OS disrupts too many other areas in life to justify the discount

Might want to put UNIX as one of those top level points.

I don't know either. macOS is pretty much the single reason why our team and I are staying on the Apple ship while crying over other laptops that cost half as much and yet provide superior performance.

On the contrary I wish I could buy Mac hardware running Linux. (Or that would work well once I put Linux on it.)

They also buy them for iMessage continuity between devices. Can’t have those green bubbles.

One look at the pictures and I immediately question the difference in comfort between these 2 machines. Big difference and nice benchmarks, but ... it's just not the whole story.

How do the displays compare? Or the trackpad? How will the Acer hold up after two years of use? Raw speed is only one factor.

Does the keyboard work?

If the Acer needs replacing after two years, and the Mac after five, you're still ahead, asuming a similar speced Acer is available for a similar price in the future.

Not only that, you'll probably get even better performance after two years by replacing the cheaper acer.

Guess which computer will still be running strong in 5 years?

Show me Motion 5 and FCPX for Windows and I'll gladly switch.

So we all know that can't happen; whats keeping you away from the adobe suite? From my research as a begining youtuber, the biggest hurdle seems to be price

- paying the extortion every month, - speed (no real time in AE/Premiere)

You should try davinci resolve. It has a free version, and even runs on linux.

Tried both - Resolve is slower and, most importantly, TONS less intuitive than FCPX (even than Motion 5). Also, last I checked, the free version of Resolve is non-commercial

Because performance specs are the only factor in buying a laptop.

This kind of bad PR will push Apple to using their own chips in future laptop form factor models.

Sadly because unless there is a miracle to secure licensing IP from Intel in the process this will remove virtualization options for Windows from the platform.

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