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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Someone had a battery life test for phones. The iPhones beat the android phones in nearly every test by hours. And they only had 60-70% of the raw battery capacity.

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.

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Who went back to AMD/Intel stuff? Any Apple user is far away from that, and comparing the performance, heat, noise, and battery differences between my Intel and Apple Silicon computers, I have no desire to regularly use an Intel machine until they make some stratospheric leap.

(I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)

I did. I moved over to linux mint for at-the-desk programming (though I still use a macbook while traveling). My linux desktop idles at 0% CPU, which is something macos hasn't been able to deliver for 5+ years at this point.

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.

> They just consume a lot more power

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.

Not upset but resigned I guess. Making do for now - typing this on my Macbook but my main desktop is Windows as is my work Laptop.

Could Windows have better battery life? Probably only by dropping backward compatibility and moving to a Linux kernel or something radical.

A lot of stuff on MacOS ran faster on an M1 with Rosetta 2 than it ran on the Intel chips Apple was selling the year before.

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.

Yep. I'm curious if microsoft ever takes the reverse engineering work from Asahi linux and uses it to make a native Windows for Apple Silicon. Or just work with Apple like they did for Bootcamp and port the real Apple drivers to the windows driver model.

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.

The entertaining thing here is that Apple’s walled garden is intended to keep people in, but here it’s keeping them out. The M1 is a technical marvel, but if you’re not already tied to Apple, it’s nowhere near good enough to warrant leaping that wall.

But isn't the walled garden in thsi case part of the appeal? i.e. running windows on it bare metal would not be as performant because of all the tighly coupled hardware-software integration apple do?

The tighly coupled hardware-software integration is mostly a myth. Linux is super-fast on Apple Silicon and Windows or Android would probably also benefit.

"Apple should adopt Dell's business model, it will work briliantly" is a thing that Apple have heard for a long time.

When they tried in the 90s they went broke and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.

I meant the rest of the industry. They said “wow” and then went back to business as usual. They had talking points about how they’ll improve and performance (as always) and efficiency got talked up more.

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?”

It's surprising that efficiency is barely mentioned still, in all the latest AMD / Intel reviews, maybe it's even a point that early reviewers have to avoid or something?

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.).

Hardware Unboxed is the only reviewer that I see that discusses efficiency consistently when reviewing parts (be they CPUs or GPUs)

What can you do about it. Outside of Apple hardware running macOS you just can't get the same. We can demand all we want but no one can offer what is available from Apple yet. I'm certainly not surprised Qualcomm/Intel/AMD want to add more fire to their feet by talking up their competition.

But you have to demand it. People have to make clear to the vendors that this matters.

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.

> Qualcomm just doesn’t seem to be trying very hard in the computer segment.

They're functionally a monopoly. They don't have to.

They’re a monopoly in phones. They’re no-one of consequence in computers. That’s where I want them to try.

Thanks for clarifying, now I get it! And fully agreed - once you use an M1 that's cold to the touch even while doing some heavy lifting, it's hard to imagine using an Intel machine that gets warm just running Zoom and a few browser tabs.

For VR and games, Apple doesn’t compare to PCs for now until Apple Reality is released. Apple tolerates video games now because of the revenue, but they still don’t like them. The M2 is the most amazing Apple upgrade that I’ve ever had, but it’s an ecosystem that doesn’t garner enough support for non-mobile, non-iOS video games.

It is astonishing to me that people are out there buying Intel PC laptops when the M1 MBA can be had for <$1000

It depends what is important to you.

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.

I’m not advocating everyone switch to Mac. I’m sorry if I gave that impression.

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.

Are you (MBCook) and sylens the same person? You are replying as if you are.

Sorry. You’re right. Heh.

No we’re not. I thought it was a reply to my comment higher above in the hierarchy.

Sorry about that.

THIS! Apple:- fair warning an inside Bollywood joke.

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.

That wasn’t what I was trying to say.

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.

Okay! Thanks for the clarification!

The base MBA comes with only 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD and has very limited upgrade option. Also Apple charges crazy prices for more RAM and storage.

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 not arguing people should switch to an M1 Mac.

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.

Um. Cheaply to 10+ TB SSD? Where are you shopping?! I want to go there.

Samsung 870 QVO 8TB is under $700.

> It is astonishing to me that people are out there buying Intel PC laptops when the M1 MBA can be had for <$1000

Can the M1 MBA run Windows?

EDIT: Or can it run GNU/Linux natively (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320765)?

Apple Silicon Macs can run Windows and Linux in a VM. Asahi Linux (native) is making decent progress.

To caveat, Linux in a VM is decent enough for non GUI programs, Windows might have harder limitations on anything that wants GPU power or direct peripherics access, and Asahi Linux is a research project at this point.

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.

I understand the sentiment but a dead ssd won't permanently brick a large portion of x86 laptops.

More to the point: I can still access the data from the SSD even if every other component on the laptop was dead. Heck, I could pop the SSD into another laptop and continue working where I left off.

Comments like this astonish me, a little. First that Apple is so good at advertising. Well done! Second, that a Macbook Air is the only form factor anyone could conceivably need? Or that macOS covers all use cases?

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!

First, I'm not in Apple's corner by any means. Before I left this comment, I left another one on a different story critical of what they've been doing with macOS.

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.

I guess that says something about the concessions some of us will do to avoid using MacOS.

An Intel laptop can be had for like $200

I have a macbook pro 16 (the last Intel one) and it has a claimed 10 hour battery life. I use it mostly for ms office (excel, PowerPoint, outlook) and have zoom/teams open in the background, as well as citirx for access to some Linux servers. I'm lucky to get an hour and a half. Fans running, etc. Window_server chwes up battery like no one's business. Nice hw is nice, but I'm very dissapointed at my first toe-dip into the mac world

I’ve got a similar machine. The last 15” Intel.

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.

That's interesting, thanks. I would have assumed Window_server would be a common issue cpu on all platforms, is that not the case? If so do you know if disabling 3d acceleration could help etc?

The M1 is a marvel, however there's a vast range of things it's not going to do anytime soon, e.g. CUDA, eGPU etc - nevermind games.

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!)

This was the general sentiment when Apple was on PowerPC, and we were buying pricier mac laptops just because of the OS.

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.

Well, $1000 upfront plus $100 a year for the right to develop apps.

$1000 is still more than I would guess about half of PCs.

It would surprise me if my mother, grandparents, sister, etc. have ever sent more than $800 on a computer.

The M-series is very directly comparable to, say, an AMD Zen 3 v-cache or a Zen 4 processor. In many scenarios the AMD is faster, and in others the M-series is faster.

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.

Also cost. You won't be M1 price/performance ratio in a laptop.

That can't possibly be a useful benchmark. There are hundreds of Android models with different batteries and power characteristics. Was it just CPU power efficiency?

Apple's decision to keep the A15 in the lower-tier 14 models shows that they did not expect everyone else (Qualcomm) to stop innovating on performance.

This is very hard for me to believe, even when I see the test results. Everyone I know with an Apple phone is either over 60 or looking for a charger.

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