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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

The point of a computer as a workstation is it goes vroom. Computer that does not go vroom will not be effective for use cases where computer has to go vroom. It doesn't matter if battery life is longer or case is thinner. That won't decrease compile times or improve render performance.

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The point of a computer as a workstation is it goes vroom.

The M1 is not currently in any workstation class computer.

It is in a budget desktop computer, a throw-it-in-your-bag travel computer, and a low-end laptop.

When an M series chip can't perform in a workstation class computer, then your argument will be valid. But you're trying to compare a VW bug with a Porsche because they look similar.

The "low-end laptop" starts at $1300, is labeled a Macbook Pro, and their marketing material states:

"The 8-core CPU, when paired with the MacBook Pro’s active cooling system, is up to 2.8x faster than the previous generation, delivering game-changing performance when compiling code, transcoding video, editing high-resolution photos, and more"

None of those are traditional Mac workstation workloads. No mention of rendering audio/video projects, for example. These are not the workloads Apple mentions when it wants to emphasize industry-leading power. (I mean, really, color grading?)

This MBP13 is a replacement for the previous MBP13; but the previous MBP13 was not a workstation either. It was a slightly-less-thermally-constrained thin-and-light. It existed almost entirely to be “the Air, but with cooling bolted on until it achieves the performance Intel originally promised us we could achieve in the Air’s thermal envelope.”

Note that, now that Apple are mostly free of that thermal constraint, the MBA and MBP13 are near-identical. Very likely the MBP13 is going away, and this release was just to satisfy corporate-leasing upgrade paths.

> It is in a budget desktop computer, a throw-it-in-your-bag travel computer, and a low-end laptop.

I took "budget desktop computer" to be the Mac Mini, "throw-it-in-your-bag travel computer" to be the Macbook Pro, and "a low-end laptop" to be the Macbook Air.

But I agree - the 13" is billed as a workstation and used as such by a huge portion of the tech industry, to say nothing of any others.

"workstation class" is a made up marketing word. Previous generation macbooks were all used for various workloads and absolutely used as portable workstations. Youre moving the goalposts.

It’s not, if you’ve ever worked with actual workstations.

I’m talking Silicon Graphics, not Dell.

Do not use MacBook Air when you need vroom! Buy computer designed to vroom.

A laptop is not a workstation.

I work with a Lenovo P70 with 64GB of RAM, a quadro M3000 GPU and a 4K monitor plus 2 external monitor ports (HDMI and display port)

I did not choose it, they gave it to me at work, but it's definitely a workstation

It's not a lightweight laptop, but it's a laptop nonetheless

"Mobile workstation" needs to be an official category.

You know. The "laptops" that work about 1 hour, maybe 2 on battery power and require a power brick the size of a VHS cassette to operate.

Ah but according to the Official Category Consortium you’ve just eliminated several products[1] which would presumably be included if the “mobile workstation” moniker was designated based on workload capabilities.

[1]: including the 16” MBP, but certainly not limited to it

Laptop used to be a form factor (it fits on your lap) while very light, very small laptops, were in the notebook and subnotebook (or ultra portable) category.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnotebook

P.s. in Italian they are usually referred to as "portatili" (portable) from the 80s portable computers, even though they were not laptops

I usually think of "subnotebook" as implying the keyboard is undersized; a thin and light machine that is still wide enough for a standard keyboard layout is something else.

I think we should bring back the term "luggable" for those mobile workstations and gaming notebooks that are hot, heavy, have 2hr or less of battery life.

Some laptops are workstations. This is not one.

Docked laptop is. With a benefit that if you want to work on the road you can take it without having to think about replicating your setup and copying data over.

Then what is a macbook for? Expensive web browsing? I've been told for a long time that macbooks are for work. Programmers all over use them, surely. Suddenly now none of that applies? To get proper performance you have to buy the mac desktop for triple the price?

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