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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

The trend in laptops has been for longer battery life and less heat. Since there haven't been any major breakthroughs in battery technology or mobile processor power (at least from Intel), this means lower power for processors and generally lower performance in general. Almost all laptops are using ultra low voltage Intel chips. And even the ones that don't, except for high end gaming laptops, thermally throttle ALL the time.

As a result, your 10 year old desktop is probably 50-100% faster than the most expensive Macbook Pro or Thinkpad. It can be quite astonishing swapping to even an old desktop after using a laptop for a long time.

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Eventually laptops will be so optimized for battery life, and display ads will be so aggressive, that you'll have to run chromium in the cloud and your thin client will be shut down the moment anyone accuses you of being a fascist. https://blog.cloudflare.com/browser-beta/

Don't go giving them any ideas.

This is hilarious!

I know you put the Intel disclaimer in there, but I just bought a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS and am loving it. It has me pretty hyped to get an AMD processor for the first time for my desktop when the 5900 launches in November. But the laptop chip has far exceeded my expectations.

I have to agree that the latest AMD Renoir processors are beasts - I have 4800H in a laptop that can sustain 54W TDP OOTB and CPU benchmarks are within spitting distance of my 3700X workstation. Amazing for a 1.5kg portable package.

I'm planning to drop in a 5950X upgrade in the workstation in a couple weeks as well. Looking forward to both the huge multi-threaded and IPC gains.

Which laptop is that?

Also, many laptops have non-replaceable batteries, and a significant percentage fail in 24-30 months.

FYI Lenovo and probably others have an option to limit max charge which will greatly extend battery life.

I have mine set to 80% and only set it to 100% if I know I'm going to be away from AC for a while.

Most laptops have replaceable batteries from my experience. Its just you have to grab a screwdriver and open them up first.

What example configuration machine from a decade ago can match (or beat) a current-gen maxed-out Thinkpad or Macbook Pro in raw performance? Those laptops are quite speedy compared to something from 2010

Slight exaggeration on my part. I was thinking of my old desktop which is about 6 years old - taking about half the time to compile a project compared to my brand new MBP.

Maxed out MacPro4,1 or equivalent HP workstation class PC

I mean it mostly depends on what you do no? But all I need is for my job is a terminal session open. A macbook from 2010 can (and does) do that fine for me. I don't need the 85% of the specs I never use and I suspect the same applies to the author.

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