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Comment by mkl95 | Hacker News Reader

My desktop computer -which doubles as my workstation- is going to be 10 years old soon. The replacements during these years make it a beast to this day, it beats a $5000 Macbook Pro into a pulp for a fraction of the price. I'm not considering ditching it for now.

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The place desktops will always win is sustained performance. Sure, a $5000 Mac can run very fast in sprints, but as soon as it's loaded up and running at 100% CPU for more than a couple minutes it's going to start throttling. That's pretty much unavoidable for a mobile computer - there's only so much space to move air around. Processors are just fancy ways to convert electricity to heat when it comes down to it, and desktops have lots of surface area to dissipate that heat.

The only laptop I've ever owned that had good sustained performance was a Dell Precision workstation machine[1] which could run at quad core i7 full load at 3.8 GHz for hours thanks to its pair of massive internal blower fans.

[1] https://www.myfixguide.com/manual/wp-content/uploads/2014/05...

Mostly any pc you build with much less than $5k will beat a $5k MacBook pro

In my experience, it beats mid to high tier iMacs as well. Those things get clunky for no reason.

iMacs are usually laptops in all but name. To hit the same thinness with a giant heat-producing screen, most of the parts are their mobile equivalents.

Edit: on slightly closer inspection, this isn't true for the 27" models!

The 27" models have traditionally used off the shelf socketed CPUs though, which is unusual in AIOs. Regular 27" models use desktop i9s and the Pro uses a desktop Xeon. Both can technically have their CPUs upgraded even if opening them is a pain.

Ah, cool. I was too focused on the GPUs! edit: which... actually appear to be the desktop-named parts! I swear this wasn't always the case...

Thank god for them being thin, I actually had to throw away my 2013 iMac because it was just unbearable reading my emails with x-ray vision and noticing just how thick it is.

What is hilarious is that the thin imac weighs the same 20lbs as the one that was a few inches thicker and had better cooling and user replaceable parts.

When the M2 Mac Pro drops, the tables will turn: no PC will even nearly match it.

I don’t see how that is possible. Desktop PCs have almost unlimited space — cases can be measured in cubic feet. MacBooks are always space constrained because of their case size and weight minimizing, so there is an inherent disadvantage in the size of components like graphics boards. And a size disadvantage means fewer transistors and less cooling.

Parent is referring to Mac Pro (the desktop).

I blame Apple's product line branding for this confusion. I make the same mistake all the time.

To be fair the mac pro went through its own horrible shrinkage phase where it was not much larger than my $50 air filter. The old aluminum case used to be pretty large and pretty spacious internally, with many extra bays waiting for you to give them purpose. Not sure how the newest one stacks up to the first mac pro/mac g5 case.

So an M2 can beat a AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX or a dual CPU mobo tower with 128gb ram, also a PCI nvme? LOL right.

The M2 isn't out yet, so we don't know what it can beat. But core for core, Apple Silicon has the best performance by a wide margin with much lower power consumption than any x86 part (because while we weren't looking, RISC architecture really did change everything). Plus, its on-chip memory will equate, in a Mac Pro-like system, to gigabytes of L3 cache. Add on to that that Big Sur and later are specially optimized for the Apple chips, meaning that performance cores won't be burdened with the background tasks the OS performs, leaving 100% of their throughput available for user applications. So yeah, core for core the Threadripper will get smoked, and I wouldn't be surprised if an M2 with half the number of performance cores as a Threadripper has remains competitive with the TR for representative tasks (such as video editing, rendering, and encoding).

I think a lot of the hype is unwarranted with the M things and you will be able to match or exceed their performance for serious loads.

However... they're QUIET. So unless they manage to fuck up the desktops completely, i'll be getting one. Not with the laughable current 16G RAM though.

I do not see why not - performance of Apple processors is insane.

Cute

My M1 Air renders and edits 4k as well as my ryzen 3700x with 64 gigs of ram and a samsung nvme. It loses out in encoding though. I cant get the same quality/size ratio with VideoToolBox as I can with NVENC.

I built an $800 budget PC 7 years ago, it beats my M1 Macbook Air in Blender renders by about 20%

Upgrading a 10 yo computer (maxing RAM, swapping HD for SSD, adding a Graphics Card) is a lot cheaper than buying a basic new one and the result is a lot better.

is it as portable as a macbook pro?

For the same price point of a macbook pro you can literally get a more powerful desktop, and a more powerful laptop. Or an even more powerful desktop, and a laptop and just use a vpn with remote desktop like a normal person.

I have a Macbook Pro (though 15") and a PC, but also a ridiculously underpowered Chromebook with a crappy 11" 1366x768 screen. Lately I find myself when I'm on the run in the city to grab the Chromebook and ssh to my desktop (I've got Zerotier set up). This is my ultimate portable duo. It could be better, but it is lightweight, battery runs full day and I have all power I need. Then when I get back I have it even better with less latency.

What’s old is new again! This is how mainframe terminals worked.

That's a setup I wanted for quite some time and I know it was available for some time, but ubiquitous fast and cheap wireless Internet is something new I guess, also with all-day batteries all in a lightweight package.

Can you explain further? I'm guessing you mean once a mainframe's resources were outdated, it became a terminal?

No. In the heyday of mainframes people would remote in, with a terminal. That's where the terminal protocols many people still use on a daily basis actually come from. Sending text over the wire to display on your terminal screen, you type into a keyboard which transmits your input across the wire to the mainframe which responds with new screen updates.

Using your desktop remotely from a cheaper but more portable device is pretty much the same model (not the same thing, but model) as the way many people interacted with mainframes last century.

No, the users had crappy devices (terminals) which worked because they could access the compute resources of a bigger device (the mainframe)

Portability is not a problem, my employer provides me with a powerful laptop that I keep permanently. They are different tools that serve me in different situations.

Do you really think they wouldn't acknowledge the upsides of a laptop? Why is that relevant to raw flops/dollar?

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