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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

What exactly do you expect? x86 is quite competitive. M1 might be slightly better, but it's not like it's miles ahead.

I want a return to the status-quo when for 80% (it could be even less but let's not dwell in the number) of the price of an Apple laptop I could get a windows/linux machine matching or surpassing its specs(including stuff like battery life,energy consumption, screen dpi, noise, etc). This is not true now and I am not seeing an option in the short term.

Perhaps it is still true, but Apple is somehow becoming the budget option in that equation?

That was never really possible, or certainly wasn't ever since the laptops went to HiDPI displays. There were just a lot of teenagers showing off their ability to make gamer PC parts lists and claim that it's better than a Mac, but the value of the display/trackpad/integration have been good for a long time. It's just now the quality of the SoC is that good.

I’ve had my m1 air for a few weeks now and going back to the trackpad on my Dell XP’s 15 feels like the stone ages... it’s amazing... and safari on the Mac even makes Jenkins and Jira fast...

Fiddling around on an M1 MBA it felt faster than my 2020 16" MBP. It's half the weight, seems to get double the battery life, and costs less than 1/3.

I just can't even imagine what the gap is going to look like when Apple really refines this down.

You should compare it to other than the old Apple laptops. The Ryzen models, such as ThinkPad T14 are very fast, and if you want to go tenfold from there, there is no comparison with the modern Ryzen desktop CPUs. Why Apple always failed with Intel and its thermals is why they feel so slow compared to the M1.

A 2020 16" Macbook Pro isn't old by any measure. This argument seems disingenuous.

But they are extremely bad with their thermals and Intel is way slower than whatever AMD is pushing right now. The thing is Apple just made quite mediocre hardware. And now they're back where the competition is.

Intel is not way slower than AMD in the mobile space.

>It's half the weight

Its 70% the weight at 70% the volume of the 16". What is the point of comparing the weight of a 13" and a 16" laptop?

It is faster despite the lower battery capacity and thermals. In fact, the Macbook air has no fan.

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