And benchmarks continue to show: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1584350796233117696
And you know they have faster processors too.
It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened.
If I want a new PC laptop, it just won’t compare because no reasonable part is available for the heat/battery life I could have gotten.
(I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)
But when will any of that show up? Hardware takes time but I just don’t see reviewers demanding it. They’ll be happy if it shows up but they’re not calling out “this isn’t good enough” and I just don’t get it. How can they use an M1 and go back to a hot low battery life Intel laptop in the same price class and say “this is fine?”
As long people don’t do that everything will continue as normal. It needs to be very clear you’re not doing good enough.
As long as reviewers keep ignoring the elephant in the room in their text and scores, how are you ever going to get what I’m guessing just about everyone wants? They may not know it (us Mac users were getting annoyed at heat and noise but didn’t know how much).
But I’m convinced if someone built it, users would come out of the woodwork. So many people doing “office” work that doesn’t require high power machines would benefit. Qualcomm just doesn’t seem to be trying very hard in the computer segment.
They're functionally a monopoly. They don't have to.
To me, the performance per watt is increasingly important not only as we start approaching branch circuit limits (1200-1500W max in the US), but also as (in many places) energy prices continue to rise.
Both idle power consumption (e-state, core sleeping, etc.) and max power consumption (with a few measures of work per watt) should be highlighted in any serious review, probably on par with whatever other benchmarks (like Cinebench, Blender, etc.).
Current generation Intel / AMD desktop CPUs have similar performance to apple's M1/M2 chips. They just consume a lot more power. (Though apparently applying a slight underclock makes a huge difference.)
I'm not sure how recent intel / AMD laptop performance compares, but a PC with an x86 chip is still a great choice.
This is the thing I’m stuck on. Computers are all roughly the same speed, for the point of this discussion.
But there is no contest in power. If you’re in the Windows world you have no good choices. Fast and hot to very slow and cool.
Where is the “pretty fast and nicely cool” choice? Someone proved it can exist.
But it’s not there and people don’t seem to be very upset about that. And I’m surprised.
Could Windows have better battery life? Probably only by dropping backward compatibility and moving to a Linux kernel or something radical.
For something not highly performance sensitive like office suite or line of business stuff you’d probably be fine with a half-decent ARM chip.
So much of what we do these days is a web browser (ported) or a secret web browser (Electron/etc). I work in Java, that can be ported if it’s not already. I bet C#/CLR already are.
It’s not perfect. It’s probably not ready for 3D rendering or 4k video editing.
But a HUGE percentage of people could probably go ARM tomorrow if good chips were out there. MS has their own “Rosetta” already for running x86(-64?) on ARM. Is it slow?
From my (very weak) understanding I have the impression the ARM stuff available is really cheap/slow. Not unlike the performance of the first netbooks compared to real laptops. Things that just aren’t powerful enough.
Good for MS for making a dev machine. But a few good general purpose laptops with great battery life would probably move the needle a ton, even if only in the business market.
Apparently there's nothing stopping M1 macs from dual-booting other operating systems. As strange as it sounds, Apple laptops might make the best windows laptops you can buy today, so long as you don't need a powerful GPU. It would be like a reverse hackintosh.
When they tried in the 90s they went broke and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.
For $1000 one can buy a Windows laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB SDD, that can cheaply be upgraded to 64GB memory and 10+TB SSD (2x SO-DIMM slots + 2x M2 PCIe slots).
I’m trying to say I think people should have the option of something like it on Windows, not just the hot/power hungry stuff out there today.
It would surprise me if my mother, grandparents, sister, etc. have ever sent more than $800 on a computer.
Can the M1 MBA run Windows?
EDIT: Or can it run GNU/Linux natively (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320765)?
We’re far far from the dual booting days, running a mac VM on a Windows machine is probably the holy grail of running every OS on a single machine at this point in time.
Firstly I am mostly plugged in, so battery life is secondary.
Secondly I am a heavy Excel user, and it just isn't as good on Apple
Thirdly I use PowerBI which isn't available for Apple
Lastly I have hybrid Active Directory, and can deploy SSO trivially to my remote Windows users, which I can't on Mac. During Covid I could mail someone a PC and get them signed on to AD resources in minutes. My Windows users are first class citizens, easier to support, and happier with their IT.
Apple:- “Mere paas M1/M2/MAX,A16, Hain “ and looks at MSFT and asks “Tere paas kya Hain”?
MSFT:- Shoulder shrugs and says “Mere Paas Excel Hain”.
Apple has nothing on Excel. And Numbers languishes Excel by a few generations. Esp after the boatload of updates that Excel APIs got last year. I guess it’s all about priorities and what’s important for that business at that time.
I know there is Windows only software. I know there is software that’s better on Windows.
I don’t care if people switch to Mac.
They should all have the choice of a chip as good (or reasonably close) to the M1.
But they don’t. And it doesn’t look like that’s changing. And I find that sad.
I’m advocating Windows/Linux users should have the choice of a machine roughly as good. Doesn’t have to 1:1, but clearly there is a lot of space for “better” past what everyone is selling today.
And I don’t see that improving much after 2 years and I find it kind of sad.
Why should you have to switch OSes and everything to have a fast computer with good battery life that’s quiet and cool?
You shouldn’t.
No we’re not. I thought it was a reply to my comment higher above in the hierarchy.
Sorry about that.
https://store.steampowered.com/macos
Had they not pushed Metal so hard over Vulkan - then things would be different. There's time yet for Apple to change course. (Seems Valve open sourced MoltenVK, so that's one barrier removed at least!)
I don’t have actual experience on a windows machine right now, but if the linux subsystem is getting good enough, switching there could be worth the hardware and price penalty.
My (largely useless in this context) personal anecdote is that I spent $1029 for a gaming laptop. AMD Ryzen 7 4800H (8-cores, 16 threads), 16GB, 1TB, RTX 2060 6GB. Gets about 4-5 hours of battery doing normal stuff. Plugged in for gaming. (Yes, it runs all of my Steam collection!) It's very fast for everything I use it for. (I mostly work on my desktop, but I've used it for various development, etc. - Visual Studio Community, SQL Server Management Studio, VS Code, WSL/WSL2 and all Linux-based development I've done, photo editing, etc., of course it can run web browsers and be used to check email!)
Why wouldn't I buy a laptop that costs this much and can do so many things well? Because it doesn't work away from plugs for a day? But I live and work at home. Near lots of plugs!
But I've tried a lot of laptops over the pandemic and nothing has come close to the Apple silicon ones in terms of responsiveness, power efficiency, and just plain reliability. And in terms of sheer battery life and weight, the MBA is king of the hill. Sure, I'm not gaming on it - but then again, I can't stand gaming on a laptop to begin with, as the heat and fan noise really bother me. A typical consumer picking out a laptop for college or for use around the house would be better solved with an M1 MBA than almost any Windows laptop unless they have an absolutely mission critical software need.
The MBA isn't for everyone - heck, it can only support 1 external monitor - but it 's the right fit for that middle part of the bell curve.
Honestly it’s kind of one of the worst. The 2010 was pretty great. If you ignore they keyboard issues (a BIG DEAL) they got better for a few years.
In the last few years it became very clear Apple just couldn’t do what they wanted as the Intel chips kept getting hotter and more power hungry.
I’m sorry you got that experience. It was and now is so much better. You kind of lucked into a low point.
The main advantage of the M-series if for laptops on battery. Desktops, gaming, and software development is still significantly better on Intel-compatible desktops. E.g.: I can run Windows 11 with WSL 2 and Docker. That lets me develop using multiple huge ecosystems of tools seamlessly. With Apple, you get immediately relegated to a tiny corner of "optimised for M1" software, and have to either emulate or use cloud-hosting for everything else.