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Comment by sanketsaurav | Hacker News Reader

I've been excited about Mighty ever since it was first announced — I was the ideal customer: I use all the apps mentioned on the landing page all day long and was super pissed at how slow everything was on my MacBook Pro.

And then I upgraded to the new M1 MacBook Pro. It's been a week, and this one's so smooth I can never go back to my old computer. I just realized I get most of the advantages mentioned on Mighty's landing page (more tabs, fast performance, no fan noise) already. I don't think I need anything beyond my local Chrome.

Question to suhail: Do you think people who are on M1 (and in future, those who're on more advanced Apple Silicon) are your target customers? Is there a benchmark for Mighty's performance vs M1s?

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Yeah, that is a fun one. My M1 Macbook Air doesn't even have a fan that would need stopping, plus it lasts longer on a charge than I'm physically capable of working. And if I was really worried about either the first thing I might try is to switch to Safari.

He's fighting Moore's Law - but Moore's Law is fighting React - so I'm not sure who to bet on atm.

Wait until you see the speed at which startups are churning out definitely-native-trust-us electron desktop apps.

Similar to you. My 4 thoughts in order. 1) Yes, finally can try Mighty! 2) Wow, beautiful site! 3) Fan? Who still has a fan? 4) Using "state-of-the-art" to describe Intels?

So I'm super excited to try Mighty for persistence and high RAM use cases (I look forward to the day when I can do intense 100's of GB data vis in my browser), but the landing page seemed out of date in a post M1 World. Of course, 99.9% of the population is not on an M1 so I'm probably being an idiot.

I came to ask the same thing. "Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz." given how important single core performance is for most web apps + added streaming I doubt the Xeon setup gets close to the M1 performance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

I think Wirth's Law has already peaked as a trend. Lately the trend has been away from dynamic languages and fat bloated runtimes toward lighter weight compiled languages. The web stack (including Electron and friends) is the outlier, but eventually WASM could help fix that.

WASM is just another thing that makes the web platform (and Electron binaries) a fat bloated runtime. Anything you can do with WASM, you can do with Javascript, probably as fast or faster, because it all still needs to go through Web APIs to do anything interesting.

There's a reason asm.js existed before Wasm, and it's not because JavaScript was just too dang fast.

asm.js is JavaScript, specifically a subset of it that can be consistently optimized. So if your point is "JavaScript is slow", using JavaScript as your point of comparison is a bad way to prove it.

first off, cool HN username

second off, i think you underestimate the world's demand for more software vs the world's demand for performant software. you're possibly being selective with your datapoints on wirth's law peaking. zoom out and view the no-code movement as programming.

To me Mighty seems DOA because the M1 properly solves the problem, and makes Mighty look like an elaborate hack. I asked Suhail what he thinks on Twitter and received no reply.

https://mobile.twitter.com/borrowcheck/status/13870721940401...

It's like OSX users had a taste of what most non-OSX users have been experiencing for years and suddenly the future is here.

Are you claiming people could have fixed their slow Chrome experience by just getting off OSX? I’m fairly sure if you work with 200 tabs regularly, you’d see equally slow perf on Linux and Windows.

I'm confused by what you're trying to say.

While I think it is accurate that the Intel hardware put in Macs the past few years was rapidly falling behind competitive AMD hardware, that same hardware was still largely dominating Windows market share. (I won't speak to Linux because maybe it's such a technology aware segment that the majority already migrated away from Intel to superior AMD hardware in the past few years.)

But the point stands that most non-macOS users were on roughly the same mediocre Intel hardware. Decent single core, but increasingly hot and inefficient in the past few years.

It also seems like Big Sur + M1 is doing something kind of special with efficient use of RAM to ensure programs load and perform remarkably well.

The form factor is limiting though. You don't have to worry about power consumption on a desktop, you don't have to worry about heatsoak or throttling. The problem was they were stuffing full desktop intel chips in their thinnest computers ever, and people were expecting that their new 6-core i9 macbook would translate into real-world performance gains.

But yes, pretty much every intel-based laptop in recent years has suffered from mediocre CPUs.

Ah yes, the famous Apple Silicon-based Windows machine we’ve all been hearing about for years

The impact of the m1 in the way you are describing, is likely to be a moment in time.

I believe the blog post addresses this diagonally.

Had the same question. Eventually when everyone's on M1, why would I still need Mighty?

I assume users who can pay $30 can get a new M1 Mac? and assuming the next set of Apple silicon will be way more performant, do we even need something like mighty built on electron?

Everyone being on M1 will mean M1 devices will feel slow: the average piece of software will just expand to take advantage of the newly available performance.

“If everyone’s on M1, no one is”

Yeah, I looked through the page and didn't see anything that looked better than my M1 Macbook Air experience.

I donno about this mighty thing. But the M1 is a game changer for web performance for sure.

I am in the same bucket as this. I wonder if suhail expected this / derisked for this.

How does the performance of high efficiency CPUs like the M1 scale with TDP? (e.g. If a M1 gets a fan and pushed the same TDP as typical server CPUs does it become x times faster or just die...?)

Just wait a couple of years until more software bloat and M1 becoming slow. Wirth's law.

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