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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop.

...if you only care about the things that Apple laptops are good at. Almost nobody needs a top-of-the-line laptop to do their tasks. Most things that people want to do with computers can be done on a machine that is five to ten years old without any trouble at all. For example I use a ThinkPad T460p, and while the geekbench scores for its processor are maybe half of what Apple achieves here (even worse for multicore!), it does everything I need faster than I need it.

Battery life, screen quality, and ergonomics are the only thing most consumers need to care about. And while Macs are certainly doing well in those categories, there are much cheaper options available that are also good enough.

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This is a really useless comparison. A 10 year old laptop will be extremely slow compared to any modern laptop and the battery will have degraded.

The T460 has knock off battery replacements floating around but that’s not exactly reassuring.

Granted: it works for you (and me, actually, I’m one of those people who likes to use an old thinkpad; x201s in my case though I mostly use a dell precision these days) but people will buy new laptops- that’s a thing. The ergonomics of a Mac are pretty decent and the support side of it is excellent.

If you don’t need all that power: that’s what the MacBook Air is for, which is basically uncontested at its performance/battery life/weight.

If you need the grunt, most of the m1 pro and max offer is GPU.

You’re going to think it’s Apple shills downvoting you: it’s not likely to be that. The argument against good low wattage cpus is just an inane and boring one.

Not everyone needs 15+ hours of battery life. I'd argue that most people don't. Laptops were extremely popular when the battery life was two hours. Now even older laptops get 5h+.

So what is the trade off you think you’re making?

This is weird. I feel like I’m talking to someone who has a fixed opinion against something. It’s good for _everyone_ that these chips are as fast as the best chips on the market, have crazy low power consumption and the cost for new is comparable.

Intel have been overcharging for more than a decade when innovation stagnated.

Honestly, I’m not so hot on Apple (FD I am sending this from an iPhone), I prefer to run Linux on my machines but I would not advocate everyone to do that. Just like I wouldn’t advise people to buy old shoes because it’s cheaper. These machines are compelling even for me, a person who relishes the flexibility of a more open platform — I can not imagine myself not recommending them to someone who just uses office suites or communication software. The M1 is basically the best thing you can buy right now for the consumer; and the cost is equivalent for other business machines such as HPs elitebooks or dells latitude or xps lineup.

And for power users: the only good argument you can make is that your tools don’t work for it or you don’t like macos.

If you’re arguing a system to be worse: you’ve lost.

The tradeoff I'm making is money vs capability. My argument is that most people don't need the capabilities offered by brand new, top of the line models. A used laptop that is a couple of years old is, I think, the best choice for most people.

A new M1 laptop is likely to last 4-5 years as a good specification of machine.

A second hand laptop has much less advantage to doing that.

I think this is a false economy.

“The poor man pays twice”

But regardless: the cost isn’t outrageous when compared to the Dell XPS/latitude or HP Elitebook lines (which are the only laptops I know of designed to last a 5y support cycle).

If you’re buying a new laptop, I don’t think I could recommend anything other than an M1 unless you don’t like Apple or MacOS. Which is fair.

The trade in value for my 6 year old MacBook Air is 150 dollars. Old computers depreciate so fast, that you can afford to buy ten of them for the price of one new computer.

Looks like they’re selling for more than twice that on ebay.co.uk though. And considering MacBook airs are $1000~ devices that’s really high.

6 years is also beyond the service life of a(ny) machine.

If I look at 3 year old MacBook airs they’re selling for £600 on eBay, which is, what, half of the full cost. Not great for an already old machine with only a few good years left.

I guess you might save a bit of money using extremely old hardware and keeping it for a while. But this is a really poor argument against an objectively good evolutionarily improved cpu in my opinion.

> 6 years is also beyond the service life of a(ny) machine.

That was the case for many decades. I think it’s no longer nearly the case. I’ve got a USB/DP KVM switch on my desk and regularly switch between my work laptop (2019 i9 MBPro) and my personal computer (2014 Dell i7-4790, added SSD and 32GB).

Same 4K screens, peripherals, everything else. I find the Dell every bit as usable and expect to be using it 3 years from now. I wouldn’t be surprised if I retire the MacBook before the Dell.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980HK-vs-Inte... shows the Mac to have only a slight edge and that’s a 2 year old literal top of line Mac laptop vs a mid-range commodity office desktop from 6 years ago bought with < $200 in added parts. (Much of what users do is waiting on the network or the human; when waiting on the CPU, you’re often waiting on something single-threaded. Mac is < 20% faster single-threaded.)

Yeah, desktops vs laptops.

20W parts vs 84W parts.

Honestly, I'm not sure what we're discussing anymore. If you don't need (or want) an all round better experience then that's on you.

But don't go saying that these things are too expensive or that the performance isn't there. Because it is.

If Apple had released something mediocre I'd understand this thread, but this is a legitimately large improvement in laptop performance, from GPU, to memory, to storage, to IO, to single threaded CPU performance.

Everyone kept bashing AMD for not beating Intel in single thread.

Everone bashed Apple for using previous Gen low TDP intel chips.

Now Apple has beaten both AMD and Intel in a very good form factor, and people still have a bone to pick.

Please understand that your preference is yours, these are legitimately good machines, every complaint that anyone had about macbooks has been addressed. Some people will just never be happy.

I was commenting only on whether “6 years is beyond the service life of any machine”, which I tried to make clear with my quoting and reply.

I’ve got no bone to pick with Apple and am not making any broad anti-Apple or anti-M1 case. (I decided to [have work] buy the very first MBPro after they un-broke the keyboard and am happy with it.)

Of the five to eight topics you raise after your first two sentences, I said exactly zero of them.

Oh. Sorry, in a very broad sense the support contract on any machine is only 5 years. After which you're basically living on borrowed time.

That's why companies aren't giving out 5+year old laptops/desktops.

(well, I suppose some do, but big companies simply wouldn't)

I assume the whole context of the thread and assumed you were defending the parent.

As the parent, I'd like to say... my entire argument isn't that top-of-the-line laptops are too expensive for what they do but rather that

(1) older macbooks are identical to mediocre new laptops in performance & price

(2) medicore laptops are very cheap for what they do

(3) desktops are far more economical when you need power.

If you spec out a laptop to be both powerful, light weight, and as beautiful as a MBP then you're going to pay a real premium. Paying for premium things is not the default.

> 6 years is also beyond the service life of a(ny) machine.

I'm still on 2013 MBP which doesn't show any signs of deterioration (except battery life). It's got retina, fast SSD, ok-ish GPU (it can play Civ V just fine).

I'd gladly pay for a guarantee that the machine will not break for the next 10 years - I think it will still be a prefectly usable laptop in 10 years from now.

No delamination issues with the screen?

> I guess you might save a bit of money using extremely old hardware and keeping it for a while.

If you get the best, and keep it for a while then even though it won't be bleeding edge anymore it'll still be in the middle of mediocre.

When it comes to computers, mediocre is actually pretty usable. A $600 computer can do pretty much everything, including handling normal scale non-enterprise software development. I didn't really realize it until I went back to school for science, but many projects are bound by the capacity of your mind and not the speed of your CPU.

If I do need computing power, I use a desktop.

6 years? I afraid that's just not the case. I have a cheap 2013 dell laptop that is all i need for office 2017 and a few other things that just work better in windows than linux (zoom/webex/office/teams). I gave about $150 for that thing and another $50 to double the ram. It's fine for what I need and use it with very little lag. I'll admit I cheated a little bit and put in an 256GB SSD drive that I have laying around.

Trade-in value on electronics is way lower than resale value. I’ve sold a couple 2014/2015 MacBook Pros this year for $700+ and probably could’ve gotten more had I held out.

Was that via ebay? I really want to sell my devices. Since work-from-home became a norm, I'm struggling to find actual reasons to use a laptop.

No, it was to coworkers. Going on eBay completed auctions, I could’ve gotten around $800-1k for similar spec / condition machines.

> I think this is a false economy.

> “The poor man pays twice”

I'm still using an X-series Thinkpad I bought used in 2011. I had another laptop in-between but it was one of these fancy modern machines with no replaceable parts and it turned out 4 GB RAM is not enough for basic tasks.

Also the M1 runs near silent or in case of the Air actually silent. I would pay an extra 1000 just for that alone. Turned out the Air was barely more than that in total. Which other laptop does that?

> My argument is that most people don't need the capabilities offered by brand new, top of the line models. A used laptop that is a couple of years old is, I think, the best choice for most people.

I think you're correct. But also the majority of people will buy brand new ones either way. And a lot of them will spend much more than they should too.

That's why most people buy the bottom of the line models. The base Macbook Air is the most common purchase, and the best choice for most people.

People buy it brand new because its small, lightweight, attractive, reliable, long-lasting hardware with very low depreciation, great support, and part of Apple's ecosystem. Cost is not the same as value and the value of your dollar is much greater with these.

This is fine and people who have budget limits have options both new and used. It seems like this has been the case for quite a while although things like the pandemic probably impacted the used market (I haven't researched that.)

The thing you are denying is that people have both needs and wants. Wants are not objective, no matter how much you try to protest their existence. There is no rational consumer here.

There are inputs beyond budget which sometimes even override budget (and specific needs!) Apple has created desirable products that even include some slightly cheaper options. The result is that people will keep buying things that they don't really need, but they'll likely still get some satisfaction. I don't suggest that this is great for society, the environment, or many other factors - but, it's the reality we live in.

> Not everyone needs mobile internet. I'd argue that most people don't. Mobile phones were extremely popular when they didn't have any internet connectivity.

I am not mocking you, but here the case is that people do not know what true mobility for laptops is, that they literally can leave power brick behind, not to think about whether the battery lasts or not and use it freely during the day everywhere. This has been impossible until now, there has always been the constraint of do I really need to open my laptop, what if it dies, where is the power plug. As soon as masses realize that this is now no worry, everyone wants and needs 15+ hours battery life.

Unless those usecases are already covered by other devices that they have. A couple of years ago I might have wanted to use my laptop all day so that I can check the internet, listen to music etc. But today I can just use my phone for that.

Here's a different take to that: If I refuse to use Windows as my OS on my Dell Inspiron 7559 I have to live with like 2 hours of battery life and a hot lap because power management doesn't work properly. So much as watching a YouTube video under Linux makes it loud and hot.

Same laptop could do 9+ consistently for me in Windows and remained quiet unless I was actually putting load on it.

The reading I've done on the Framework laptops makes it sound like this situation has not improved, or at least not anywhere near enough to compete with Windows.. this has effectively ruled them out of the running on a replacement laptop for me.

An M1 based Macbook sure is looking appealing these days. I can live with macOS.

Not everyone needs decent battery life, but some of us do.

> The reading I've done on the Framework laptops makes it sound like this situation has not improved.

And yet I hear otherwise.. maybe your referencing the original review units that didnt run on 5.14.

It's possible, and when actively in the market I'll always revisit such things.

for me it's the heat and lack of fan noise. I know that's not something that bothers some people but I thoroughly enjoy (the lack) of it.

> The argument against good low wattage cpus is just an inane and boring one.

> Not everyone needs 15+ hours of battery life.

Low wattage is not only about battery life. It is mostly about requiring less power for the same work. However you look at it, it is good for everyone. Now that Apple has shown that this can be done, everyone else will do the same.

Define "extremely". You get maybe a factor 2 or so, not 10 or 100. Is that nicer? Yes, sure. Is it necessary? No, older stuff is perfectly sufficient for most people.

Also, it is "if you need that power and need it with laptop formfactor". Again, impressive, but desktops/servers work just as well for most people.

2011 desktop CPUs will perform about half as well as a modern laptop one.

I don’t even think Sandybridge (Intel 2011) CPUs support h264 decode- a pretty common requirement these days for zoom, slack, teams and video streaming sites such as YouTube.

> about half

Exactly, no 100x, no 10x, just half. That is very noticeable but "extreme" sounds like much more.

> I don’t even think Sandybridge (Intel 2011) CPUs support h264 decode-

Correct, but unrelated to CPU speed and instead an additional hardware component. That is a fair argument, just like missing suitable HDMI standards, usb c, etc.. However, again that is not about speed but features.

Yes… only half as well as modern laptop. Back on the era of Moore’s law, a new machine would be 32x as fast as a ten year old model.

That was a real difference.

But in 2021, people still buy laptops 1/2 as slow as other models to do the same work. Heck people go out of their way to buy iPad pros which are half as slow as comparable laptops.

Considering that, I think a ten year old machine is pretty competitive as an existing choice.

> iPad pros which are half as slow as comparable laptops.

Uh, what?

iPads are using comparable CPUs to the M1 (some even use the M1) and are some of the fastest CPUs for rendering JavaScript on the planet.

I think you’re right that people buy slow laptops. But I think that often comes from a place of technical illiteracy and willingness to spend.

Put simply: they can’t often comprehend the true value of a faster system and opt to be more financially conservative.

Which I fully understand.

IPad Pro 2021: 1118 on geekbench[1] priced at @ 2,199.00 fully specced at the 12.9 inch model with keyboard.

Macbook Air 2020: 1733 on geekbench[2]. Priced @ about 1,849.00 fully speced for 13-inch model.

That's what I mean by comparable tablets are more expensive than laptops. You have to pay a lot more because it has a dual form factor (like the Microsoft Surfacebooks).

[1]https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10527696

[2]https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10527696

Sandy Bridges actually do have hardware decoding, but this isn't really a CPU feature, since it's a separate accelerator more akin to an integrated GPU. FWIW sites like Youtube seem to prefer the most bandwidth-efficient codec regardless of whether hardware decoding is available.

>2011 desktop CPUs will perform about half as well as a modern laptop one.

Maybe, but the fat client-thin client pendulum has swung back in favor of thin clients to the point that CPU performance is generally irrelevant (it kind of has to be, since most people browse the Web with their phones). As for games, provided you throw enough GPU at the problem acceptable performance is still absolutely achievable, but that's not new either.

>a pretty common requirement these days for zoom, slack, teams and video streaming sites such as YouTube

It really isn't: from experience the hard line for acceptable performance is "anything first-gen Core iX (Nehalem) or later"- Core 2 systems are legitimately too old for things like 4K video playback, however. The limiting factor on older machines like that is ultimately RAM (because Electron), but provided you've maxed out a system with 16GB+ and an SSD there's no real performance difference between a first-gen Core system and an 11th-gen Core system for all thin client (read: web) applications.

That said, it's also worth noting that the average laptop really took a dive in speed with Haswell and didn't start getting the 10% year-over-year improvements again until Skylake because ultra-low-voltage processors became the norm after that time and set the average laptop about 4 years back in speed compared to their standard-voltage counterparts: those laptops genuinely might not be fast enough now, but the standard-voltage ones absolutely are.

Saying a 10 year old laptop is 2x or 4x slower than a new laptop is just a tiny part of the big picture.

I would say that for a light laptop user, the main reasons to upgrade are:

- displays: make a big difference for watching youtube, reading, etc. You can't really compare a 120 Hz XDR retina display with a 10 year old display.

- webcam: makes a big difference when video conferencing with family, etc.

- battery life: makes a big difference if you are on the go a lot. My 10 year old laptop had new something like 4 hours battery life. Any new laptop has more than 15h, some over 20h.

- fanless: silent laptops that don't overheat are nice, nicer to have on your lap, etc.

- accelerators: some zoom and teams backgrounds use AI a lot, and perform very poorly on old laptops without AI accelerators. Same for webcams.

If you talk about perf, that's obviously workload dependent, but having 4x more cores, that are 2-4x faster each, can make a big difference. I/O, encryption, etc. has improved quite a bit, which can make a difference if you deal with big files.

Still, you can get most of this new stuff for 1000$ in a macbook air with M1. Seems like a no brainer for light users that _need_ or _want_ to upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade, that's ok, but saying that you are only missing 2x better performance is misleading. You are missing a lot more stuff.

But that's the thing. You can upgrade all that.

I’ve got a T470 with a brand new 400nits 100% sRGB and like 80% AdobeRGB screen. You can even get 4K screens with awesome quality for the T4xx laptops with 40-pin eDP.

With 17h battery life even on performance mode.

With a new, 1080p webcam.

With 32GB of DDR4-2400 RAM

With 2TB NVMe Storage.

With 95Wh replaceable batteries, of which I can still get brand new original parts and which I can replace while using the laptop.

for a total below 500$.

If I'd upgrade the top-of-the-line T480 accordingly, I'd still be below 800$ and performance that's not that far off anymore.

I'm still using my 12 (!) year old 17" MacBook Pro as daily work machine. Yes, it's not the fastest computer but for my usage it works. Granted, starting IntelliJ needs some time, but coding still works well (and compiling big codebases isn't done locally).

The one thing that really isn't usable anymore is Aperture/Lightroom. And missing docker because my CPU is too old (but docker it still works in VMs ...) is a pain.

I'm still using my 2014 16" MacBook Pro too - the SSD has made such a dramatic difference to the performance of machines that I think in general they age much better than previously.

I'm not a heavy user but that machine can easily handle xcode Objc/c++ programming quite handily.

The keyboard of the ThinkPad is and was always great and the TrackPoint is a bonus on top of it for some of us. The other part of Input/Output is a good screen. Only after I/O the performance is of matter.

What I don't like about Apples devices is the keyboard, they don't provide a equally good trigger point (resistance and feedback) and the keycaps aren't concave (not leading fingers). The quality problems and the questionable Touchbar are problem, too. Lenovo did that before Apple and immediately stopped it, they accept mistake far quicker. I still suspect both - Apple and Lenvo - tried to save money with a cheap touchbar instead of more expensive keys.

But there is the performance? First, Apple only claims to be fast. What matter are comparisons of portable applications and not synthetic benchmarks. Benchmarks never mattered. Secondly, Apple uses a lot of money (from the customers) to get the best chip quality in industry from TMSC.

What we have are the choice between all-purpose computers from vendors like Lenovo, Dell or System67 or computing appliances from Apple. I say computing appliance and not all-purpose computer, because I'm not aware of official porting documentation for BSD, Linux or Windows. More importantly MacOS hinders free application shipment not as worse as iOS but it is already a pain for developers, you need to use Homebrew for serious computing tasks.

Finally the money?

Lenovo wants 1.000 - 1.700 Euro for a premium laptop like ThinkPad X13/T14 with replacement parts for five years, public maintenance manuals and official support for Linux and Windows.

Apple wants 2.400 - 3.400 for no maintenance manuals, no public available replacement parts and you must use MacOS. Okay, the claim it is faster. Likely it is.

You buy performance with an exorbitant amount of money but with multiple drawbacks? Currently I'm still using a eight year old ThinkPad X220 with Linux. The operating-system I want and need, excellent keyboard, comfortable trackpoint and a good IPS-Screen. I think the money was well spent - for me :)

> Most things that people want to do with computers can be done on a machine that is five to ten years old without any trouble at all.

Please, browsing web has always been pain on old hardware.

You cannot win this argument because for some people Lynx in a terminal is an acceptable way of browsing the web.

Also, people argue in bad faith all the time and a lot of people for whom it isn’t an acceptable way of browsing the web would pretend it is anyway to win an argument.

> Battery life, screen quality, and ergonomics are the only thing most consumers need to care about.

You, Sir, are a very utilitarian consumer. Most consumers care about being in the "In" crowd, i.e., owning the brand that others think is cool. Ideally, it comes in a shiny color. That's it. The exact details are just camouflage.

Yea I agree. Implicit in my statement is `for the people in the market Apple is targeting`. You aren't going to buy a $4000 computer and you'll be happy with a clunker. I, and many people in my situation, don't feel there are options for $4000 laptops right now.

surprised by your experience with an older laptop. I have both a 4 years old dell (forget it's name right now, for biz uses) and a 2015 MBA (which makes it 6 years old now), and they are both getting SLOW. In a vacuum - they are fine, they pull through. but they are notably slow machines. (i prefer windows but can't stand the dell and find myself keep going back to the mba - although youtube sucks on that machine with chrome)

edit: oh the mba battery is still a miracle compared to the dell's, btw

I bought the T460p last year. It replaced a 2009 Macbook pro with spinning rust. That machine was fine too, but it stopped getting updates years ago so I had to replace it. I hope that Linux will support the T460p for longer.

A lot of people don't have a desktop so a very powerful laptop that just works (tm) well for software development and can be lugged around effortlessly is ideal. I haven't owned a desktop myself in years and many engineers I know have been letting their rigs collect dust as the laptop just does it all.

For the price, there isn't something comparable in all respects.

> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop.

They already don't make sense as the M1 isn't a "general purpose" CPU like Intel or AMD that support multiple operating systems, and even the development of new ones. Instead, the M1 is a black-box that only fully supports macOS - that's a crippling limitation for many of us.

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