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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

What laptop are you on that struggles to play Youtube on Chrome?

My 2016 HP Elitebook G3 does.

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6600U CPU @ 2.60GHz

It doesn't have hw acceleration for VC1, so youtube specifically has a lot of issues. I've been able to rectify it by using h264ify to force youtube to give me h264 but a normie isn't going to be able to figure that out.

I have 6100U and it seems fine...

I have the same processor in my ThinkPad T470s and it's terrible for anything video.

Even a browser (Chrome and Firefox) tab in the background with a few CSS animations causes it to be noticeably unresponsive in other applications.

It supports 4K output but my tests (backend TypeScript) are measurably slower when the display is at 4K vs 1440p.

What OS are you using? I run Linux so I'm wondering if it's that, but I've tried every different DE and Xorg Vs Wayland and different drivers, and they are all just as bad.

Nothing struggles. But the Intel 2020 Air is noticeably slower than the refurbished 2012 Linux Mint (and 2015 Windows) that I own.

Disclaimer: I bought the Mac for building apps only.

The M1 macs are the fastest web browsing machines you can buy, by a huge margin. If that's your use case, there's no question what machine to get. The closest you can come with mobile x86 is to get the top-of-the-line 11th Gen Core i7, and the M1 beats that thing by almost 100% in browser benchmarks.

Yep, or alternatively an iPad Air with a magic keyboard.

(Ducks)

Not even wrong. There's hardly a difference between the latest iPad and the latest MacBook.

Interesting that the blame here seems to sit with Apple. Aren’t we asking why Google, who owns the browser, can’t make YouTube, a video player, that they own, work in that browser on 2020 hardware?

YouTube is a turd. I do everything I can to avoid using it. How they’ve screwed up a video player that badly boggles the mind.

Oh, I'm not blaming Apple for anything here. I actually love my Mac Air, for the things its really good at. I'm blaming the so-called YT influencers/content creators that lie to their audience.

Youtube is basically optimizing for their own costs over that of end users by using VP9, which uses less bandwidth but often is software-decoded. So the real answer is basically that they can, but it would cost them more.

(Of course, the YouTube frontend is also fairly bloated, which doesn't help. There isn't much of an excuse for that one).

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