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Comment by wilmore | Hacker News Reader

> Perf AVG, build eh

What kind of MBP have you looked at?

I agree with the ethos part, but the current M1 devices are pretty unique in the laptop space.

The performance is fantastic for a Macbook. The past 10 years was like watching Apple trapped in the laptop stone age, slowly realizing that replacing the ACPI tables on a laptop chip wasn't enough to change it's performance profile. With M1, they finally got to do what they wanted, albeit at the expense of x86. For the majority of Mac users that won't matter though, since Apple was never a particularly great steward of the x86 arch in the first place (like when they dropped x86 32-bit support because it was "too slow", or whatever).

Relative to the rest of the laptop space though? I think I'd simply call the M1 "competitive". It's not the first laptop we've seen with a powerful iGPU (AMD's Vega graphics were first to the party in that regard), and it's CPU performance is good but not great (it's effectively a quad-core system no matter how you end up using it). On the higher-end, it's almost a little embarrassing how hard Intel about-faced with Alder Lake and took Apple to the cleaners with a more bloated ISA, decidedly worse silicon and a complete lack of experience designing heterogeneous systems.

So far, the only unique thing I've seen from the M1 is the battery life. I anticipate other manufacturers will catch up on that front as we transition to big.LITTLE and more dense silicon packages, so I'm not really that worried for the rest of the industry. I'm glad Apple has made a laptop that their fans can enjoy, but x86/32-bit support is non-negotiable for my workload, and they have yet to prove themselves with higher-end hardware. Time will tell, but I'm just happy that the performance wars aren't as much of a blowout anymore.

> how hard Intel about-faced with Alder Lake and took Apple to the cleaners with a more bloated ISA, decidedly worse silicon

I don't understand. About-faced and take to the cleaners? (Not a native speaker)

Ah, that's fine.

About-face is a military-derived term that means "to turn around quickly", as if commanded to.

"take to the cleaners" is a phrase usually used in sports that describes one team completely defeating another in one game/instance.

Hope that helps :p

What is eh about the build? It’s my first Apple device after a series of high end Windows laptops and I can’t find anything on the build that is not solid in comparison.

The only complaint I have is that sometimes the keys leave an imprint on the screen but that could just be my bag being too tight. I would definitely have this problem with a Thinkpad or high end HP anyway. Speakers are the best I’ve heard and the chasis is stiffer than my car’s. The screen is awesome…. In a thread about a framework laptop I don’t think I can find something that’s “eh”.

Unless you’re talking about it not being upgradable, but that’s not a build defect.

Your view on what is a good build is different to mine (which it should be!). I as part of my job sometimes fix laptops. Used to do it alot more and see alot more models but less these days. https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown There. have a read. Whilst some folks might marvel at that and think its a work of engineering glory.

To me it just looks like the IT equivalent of a john deere tractor. It'll get the job done, bit fancy, but their going to bleed every dollar out of you to do it...and your stuffed if it breaks and you want to fix it. Also after you've been in their loop for a decade....fat luck breaking out of that companies buying cycle easily. Which results in me thinking....eh avg build. avg device. Its definitely nothing special that's just marketing hype.

You may want to review what the meaning of “average” is. Take all the laptops out there, rank their build quality, and find the mean. The fixability is not a build quality issue, it’s a design choice and you know that going into it. Other laptops may appear more fixable but turns out no one makes parts for them because they were meant to be disposable, and on top of that they are a creaky thin and hollow mess with shitty hinges.

I still think that the MacBooks are all above the average of what’s out there.

The bottom panel isn't supported well against the internal components and it makes a hollow sound, it feels like plastic even though it is metal. Compared directly to the immediately preceding 16" it feels way less solid (I have both). It's also rather ugly, I look forward to Apple spending more time figuring out how to get those features and capacity into a case that doesn't echo boxy plastic PC laptops from 15 years ago.

I'm glad you say this. The latest Macbook just feels cheap. It feels and looks like one of those fake plastic computers they use for displays at Ikea. A huge difference to previous models which feel solid and high quality.

Not sure if the quality is actually any different. But my first impression was "what the fuck is this?".

I had to go tapping around to see what you meant and I still don’t understand why it matters so much. The main frame is pretty solid, and that’s where I type. Compared to the AVERAGE of the laptops out there, I still think it’s well above the mean. If one day you find yourself at a Walmart or best buy or whatever equivalent in your country, check some truly average laptops and you’ll find what an average windows laptop feels like in 2022.

Pro. It perfs incredibly well in a bunch of areas it was expected to.

Con. It can't even run code from a whole segment of apps because of archi it's built on.

Result - Perf was nothing out of line with expected results from what you'd expect the market to come up with for the next range of products.

It's really nothing special from the user end of things.

The MacBook Pro 2021 M1? It is totally something special:

1) The hardware is first class. Everything is back where it should be and improved. You can't get hardware like this anywhere else. 2) It is extremely fast. Nothing ever slows down. I can't figure out anything to throw at this thing that will turn on the fan even. 3) It just works. No drama. This is very valuable if your real value is writing code and not doing sys admin.

I'm currently using Linux (Ubuntu 21.10 on a 2015 Core i3), Windows (on a 10th gen core i7 laptop with lots of RAM but an iGPU), and macOS on an M1 Mac Mini, macOS definitely feels the slowest.

I suspect if my Windows laptop was closer to the other devices it would be slower, but Linux just feels so much faster than macOS in actual tasks. The interactions are so much "snappier", whereas with macOS most interactions feel like a chore (I think it's the animations).

You can turn some animations off, system pref > accessibility > display > reduce motion, and dock & menu bar, uncheck “animate opening applications” + “Minimize windows using” scale effect seems a touch faster than minimize with genie effect.

But agreed, the interface is not as snappy as windows and Linux.

Seriously. No other laptop on the market can do all of:

- have an insanely long battery life

- stay completely silent

- have excellent performance

The other laptops which can theoretically beat the MBP at some tasks utterly fail at being silent or having long battery life under load.

And the other silent laptops (chromebook maybe) can’t manage heavy workloads.

So it is very unique in the laptop space.

I use an M1 Macbook for work and I also have a Framework for personal use and... yeah.

I adore the Framework but I really wish there was a REAL non-Apple competitor in the laptop space. The M1 is just _so_ quiet and fast, I really have to try hard to get the fan to spin up. Can't really speak for battery life since it never leaves my desk where it's plugged in haha.

It's a shame I despise macOS so much or else I'd use this work laptop for personal stuff more often.

I did an idle battery life test. 1% per hour. Turned on, with the screen off, and an active SSH session.

That's better than many x86 laptops in full-on sleep mode. With the OS running.

People underestimate just how good modern power management can get when the vendor cares.

While I think the Apple Silicon macs are generally high end, the most fantastic thing to me is the battery life.

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