Comment by bungle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bungle | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement.

I compared highend 2010 desktop to highend 2021 laptop on my use case (which is arguably much lighter). And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor (which is great, but not a leap from 2010 desktop). I can imagine todays desktops could be much better compared to todays highend laptops, but it feels like the most of what I do, there is little reasons to upgrade. Which is also great. With Macs the latest macOS support is removed usually from 5 years old machines, but that feels mostly baseless from technical perspective as with hacks you can still run the latest just fine.

Perhaps it is a nostalgia / romancy. Having a 12 years old machine as you daily workhorse where upgrade was not a leap. That is something I haven’t seen before, and I have been in this industry since 90ies and a PC user since 80ies.

> Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement.

Day to day that doesn't matter. I work on multiplayer games, and being able to run 8/12/16 clients on one machine at 10 fps at ultra low graphics is far more important than being able to run stupid resolutions. You do bring up another point though - GPU performance. Apologies for the links but I'm on my phone, but [0] and [1] have 3dmark benchmarks for the M1 GPU and an RTX 3090 GPU - the 3090 scores twice what the M1 GPU does. This might not be important to you, but it is to some people.

> And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor

Ultimately that's all it comes down to. If you're not limited by the form factor/performance of a laptop power to you, but some of us are!

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-an...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3090-GPU-Be...

> the 3090 scores twice what the M1 GPU does

It helps that you can buy a maxed out macbook pro for the price of a single 3090 though.

I can buy a high spec showhorse for $40k, or a new mid range sedan for $40k. That doesn't mean that the maxed out showhorse will work for commuting to work every day.

A 3090 is $2300 right now, even paying the scalper tax.

How much M1 MacBook Pro is that getting you?

That said, I do wish the M1 GPU could game; my downtime hobby is the only thing stopping me from buying one.

>A 3090 is $2300 right now, even paying the scalper tax.

Where can you find that? lowest I can find is 2800 new. There are some pre-owned for 2700 and some open auctions at roughly 2300 but those will land substantially higher than 2300 I would imagine.

The 3090 is such an overpowered (and expensive) card, that another GPU doing half of what the 3090 can do is still damn right impressive. And in a Laptop!

Yeah that's actually a serious compliment to the M1 GPU if the 3090 is merely double the scores?! I expected it should be like 4x or more! That's awesome.

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