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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

Laptops have outsold desktops every year for the last decade+. The M1, being a mobile friendly chip, is addressing the larger market. People may not care about power usage from the wall, but they do care about battery life.

Also, the fact that the M1 is even being mentioned along with a desktop powerhouse like the threadripper says it all. The M1 is the lowest end mobile Apple Silicon. We know higher end mobile chips are coming along with desktop ones. The M1 has put all the chip manufacturers on notice, much the same the way the iPhone did (to the point RIM thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because they thought the device was impossible).

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It's only being mentioned alongside threadripper because the article went overboard and claimed the M1 "embarrass all other PCs — ... including ... every single machine running Windows or Linux"

This is a joke. The M1s performance is no where near the threadripper. Even on per-thread performance, new AMD cpus perform better than the M1... and they have many more cores. The M1 can only win these comparisons when we start adding all kinds of conditions, like power draw, heat, price point, etc. They need to add those conditions to redirect the conversation, because on raw performance threadripper destroys the M1.

The article made the mistake of leaving out those conditions to make it seem even more impressive than it is... but hyperbole and fantasy will always sound better than reality. Reality requires those conditions. That doesn't detract from the m1's impressiveness.. but it's foolish to forget that and go off and start making ridiculous claims like the article has done.

That was sort of my takeaway as well. I use desktop computers for most of my more demanding work. Laptops are great and (like smartphones, tablets, etc) any improvement in their capabilities is to be welcomed--but there's a difference between a headline that reads "New laptop is the fastest computer ever!" and one that reads "New laptop faster than all previous laptops!"

I don't do the most intensive tasks on thin, battery-powered computers for a reason. I try to do those on the box that's always plugged into mains power with heatsinks and fans as needed, plenty of ports to plug things in, and a big monitor. A more performant portable computer is awesome, but until I can spend a similar amount to make my workstation smaller without losing capability, I'll likely keep using it for heavy lifting alongside a cheaper, less powerful laptop or tablet for lighter work or remoting in.

Android has oversold Apple 3 to 1

Now if we look at what people are buying and ask ourselves 'are these the people who care about TDP?' the answer is simply 'no'

The majority of laptops sold are sub 700, as the previous post said, low budget, low power and in education, markets that Apple has never even considered (except education, but it's mainly college students in USA)

Not saying M1 aren't good, but that they won't shake the market as NVidia buying ARM could

P.s. M1 is a Zen 3 competitor, threadripper has been mentioned for the exact opposite reason: because that's the state of the art for people looking at performances in personal computing (while in HPC ARM is prominent)

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