Hacker News Reader

Comment by maven29 | Hacker News Reader

Why not just SSH into a significantly more capable machine and enjoy two days between battery charges instead?

(AMD just got done with their 5nm Zen 4 Computex keynote right now)

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17399/amd-ryzen-7000-announce...

I SSH into a local XEON server homelab, or one of several Hetzner servers over Wireguard (which runs in a Proxmox container). Symmetrical 1gbit fiber connection helps. Only disadvantage is that it doesnt work on (long) flights.

For me, MacBook Air M1 is just a "dumb terminal", with VSCode and its remove development server it doesnt matter where all the stuff is.

> Only disadvantage is that it doesnt work on (long) flights.

mosh?

My only problem with this is that Apple form factors/OS choices are limited.

I want a tablet dumb terminal because:

- when I'm working I'm plugged into a monitor 99% of the time (with dedicated keyboard/mouse) - when I'm traveling/consuming media/couch surfing/shopping with wife - tablet is much more convenient

But I can't really use iOS for work - iPad pro would be perfect otherwise.

I’ve been looking into buying Surface Pro, but the battery is somewhat disappointing. And then there’s Windows. I’ve been using it on my gaming machine and i don’t enjoy a single minute of it.

But yeah, I wish there’s was a good 2 in 1 as well.

Yeah - using Windows 11 on my desktop for the last month or so - it's downright ridiculous what it devolved to

I feel like a Samsung tablet would work really well there. DeX for your desktop work with Termux and the like and Android for the rest. I know people say Android has no tablet apps and while it's definitely missing stuff like Procreate it is still good for web browsing, watching streaming services etc. And Samsung's version of Android is very good at multitasking allowing things like having 4 apps running split screen, windowed apps etc. Way better than what iOS allows.

I'd still miss a "proper" OS - for example I can't run IntelliJ remote development client on Android. It's sad that Windows is so bad at this point, and Linux tablet support was 0 last time I checked.

There is the JingPad A1 at least. A ChromeOS tablet might be another avenue as well.

I've actually seen some students use ChromeOS for development but haven't thought much about it. Do you know if there are some decent ChromeOS 2in1s ?

The store is down.. :(

I’ve been using an iPad Pro with the blink shell app for almost a whole year now. I just use mosh to connect to my homelab development environment, and it works really great!

But yeah, if work doesn’t quite fit with just needing a terminal, and a few web sites or iOS apps, then it’s not going to work.

"when I'm traveling/consuming media/couch surfing/shopping with wife - tablet is much more convenient"

I hear people say this but I really disagree. I have never found a tablet more convenient.

With a tablet you either have to hold it up with one hand, while you use your other hand to navigate, or you have some sort of case with a built-in stand that is never as stabile as a laptop. You also have to be very careful holding the tablet, because otherwise you'll touch the screen and unintentionally open or close the app you're using. Also when you use a case with a tablet it often makes it as heavy as an actual laptop.

Not to mention all the keyboard shortcuts that make navigating the OS faster than a touch-based OS. I just don't really "get" tablets. I've tried iPads and Android tablets but I always grab my laptop instead.

> For me, MacBook Air M1 is just a "dumb terminal"

A $1000 dumb terminal? Wouldn't a cheaper laptop be perfectly sufficient then? Or, if the performance is not that important, something like an asus laptop with an oled, pro-motion, higher res, ... screen (same price)?

Gotto go through this again?

- Battery life - Trackpad - No keyboard flex - Superb screen and superb handling of the high dpi - M1 is superior to anything intel or Amd.

It's not fanboy'ism it is what it is.

Read the above post again? You are arguing about an entirely different question.

> M1 is superior to anything intel or Amd.

Agreed, but the above post explicitly said "dumb terminal" -> not relevant.

> Superb screen and superb handling of the high dpi

Again, yeah, but "dumb terminal" and 120Hz, oled, more pixels, ... is better. Normally you could argue that the M1 makes it worth the trade off, but if that is not in consideration....

> It's not fanboy'ism it is what it is.

Yeah,... so please stop that. Again "macbook air is a good laptop" is pretty uncontroversial; "For a dumb terminal the macbook air is the best/natural/../adjective choice", maybe, maybe not.

Okay I'll bite. Does that machine exist? You linked to a CPU page, not a machine-with-two-day-battery-life page.

I think GP meant to say that one could use a VM running on that CPU (e.g. EC2) and SSH into it with an M1 (which might provide up to 2 days of battery when used that way).

Aaaahaaaa thank you.

Because then you need two machines :)

its like when people bought two ipads to multitask XD

Ah, Apple life.

When did that happen?

Asking as an iPad owner.

It doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. The comment says something some people want to hear.

This isn’t an Apple thing, it’s a “laws of physics” thing. The parent is suggesting that you do your intensive computing on a computer that isn’t battery powered so as to prolong your laptop’s battery between charges. “Apple life” in this case is having two days between charges rather than a few hours.

Well the data will need to move with you. Not very feasible if you need the whole media library / codebase to be transported via cellular all the time. I understand the appeal when you just need terminal access tho.

I can’t think of a reason you’d need to pull your whole media library. Usually it’s just whatever show you want to watch. As for code, it’s typically small, and you can either pull incremental diffs a la git or you just do everything on your server so you don’t have to pull anything to your client at all.

Because you can buy an M1 Mac today.

By the time this Ryzen CPU appears in a real PC you can buy, the next-gen Apple Silicon Macs will have arrived, and they will be several years ahead of this Ryzen.

Also there is more to a laptop than just its CPU. Doesn't matter how great the Ryzen processor is if they can't get laptop manufacturers to put them into great laptops.

GP is proposing using Macbook as thin client to Ryzen build server. Laptop cpu is never loaded hence 2 day battery life, performance is better on anything benefiting from significant parallelization. I use same workflow with 5950X[0], works great.

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101

> Because you can buy an M1 Mac today

You can order one today. I'm still waiting for mine I ordered in March.

You can buy one today… if you’re willing to settle for bare minimum RAM & disk.

...but you better don’t settle for a minimum RAM if you are buying it not just for web surfing.

What’s the entry level spec for RAM? Like 8GB? That’s plenty for most things. I’d be more worried about disk.

16. I have an M1 Mac mini under the desk that has been doing more than fine for most of my development work on 8 GB of RAM.

Memory management on M1 is actually quite amazing. With an entry level M1 mini, I can have a crap ton of stuff open and it doesn’t choke. I can run UTM and have Chrome and a few electron apps open, and have many terminal windows open. No sweat.

For disk, I just put a 1tb NVMe in an external USBC enclosure, cuz most of my data doesn’t need crazy I/O and I feel like Apple charges too much for disk space.

I own one M1 with 8Gb RAM, one with 16Gb, and one with 32 - 8Gb was enough only for basic tasks (I’m a web developer, TS + Rust). Anything non-trivial was causing swapping.

Memory management is quite usual, nothing magical. The disk is faster, but it's not the reason to rely on swapping, still.

That just isn't true on these M1 machines. People are editing 4k, 6k, even 8k video on these and have stated that it runs better than their 2020 16GB i9 MacBooks.

There is no magic, and “unified memory” just means that you need some more memory because you have no additional “VRAM”.

Just looked at my local electronics store's website, they have multiple 32GB RAM 14" Pro and 16" Pro models available for pick up.

Just checked and this is true for 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros and Studios. Mini, and Air ship quickly, even with additionally ram or storage.

I had this exact struggle. Got hit by the delays a couple weeks ago, and got frustrated, cancelled my order, put in another order because I was minorly desperate to get the hardware for a new job, then discovered B&H not only was getting the exact config I wanted in stock, they had a waiting list that I could use to temporarily reserve one. Got the email early in the AM, logged in that day and my hold was still there, and was able to check out without hassle. 2 days later, new laptop in my hot little hands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com