I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
What on earth are you talking about?! Alder Lake was a huge step up for Intel, and Raptor Lake has improved things more than I would have expected as well. Before Alder Lake, Intel's CPUs honestly sucked. AMD still seems to have a modest competitive advantage in terms of efficiency and battery life (making AMD not that far off from where Apple is in hours of practical battery life when doing something other than looking at a static screenshot for hours on end), but Intel makes up for that with performance, and as I recall, Alder Lake is still more efficient than what Intel had before in laptops.
Sapphire Rapids is also a huge innovation compared to what Intel had been doing for years in the server market. Intel has also been introducing some really interesting GPU products now to bring competition to AMD and Nvidia, but it will probably take another generation or two to iron things out. If none of that is "innovation", then I don't know what is!
The last 2 years are the first time Intel has really been innovating in the past 5+ years!
When M1 came out, it was awesome. Since then, Intel and AMD have released processors that are significantly more competitive, while M2 was a mediocre step forward. I appreciate my M2 MBA, but Apple Silicon needs a huge upgrade with M3 to remain competitive.
For a lot of legitimate use cases, there are at least half a dozen Windows laptops coming out right now that I would instantly pick over a MacBook, and the same would not have been said 2 years ago.
Would you mind listing a couple? I'd prefer to buy a Windows machine for my next laptop, but I've been SO burned by hibernation bugs, CPU throttling, battery issues, etc. And I've had an OG 13" M1 MBP from work for the past year or so, and the performance and battery life have been unreal to that point that I'm very much considering one of these 14" M2 MBPs for myself.
In terms of innovative form factors, look at these:
- A laptop with a nice OLED screen and a Color E-ink screen. This seems like an incredible combination, although the 60Hz limit on the OLED screen is unfortunate: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-...
- This dual screen (dual OLED, even!) concept seems like it would be challenging to pull off, but every hands-on review I've seen was really impressed with it, and I can totally see use cases for this: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23518872/lenovo-yoga-book-...
- The Flow Z13 is like a Microsoft Surface with an actual GPU and a 165Hz display. This one isn't as appealing to me as the two above, but it is neat: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2023-seri...
In terms of the other category,
- The Acer Swift X 14 comes with a nice 120Hz OLED screen and an RTX 4050, so it seems like a nice, balanced laptop, but I wish it had the option for more than 16GB of RAM: https://youtu.be/va3OmoYHKYs?t=298
- The Flow X13 now comes with up to an RTX 4070 and 165Hz display and up to 32GB of RAM, and this is significantly more compact than the Swift X 14, but the display is not as nice as an OLED. This is also a convertible, so you can use the 360 degree hinge to make it into a tablet: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x13-2023-seri...
- The new Zephyrus G14 is probably the one I find most exciting, offering a 165Hz MiniLED display that's almost as nice as OLED, as well as up to an RTX 4090 (Laptop) and 32GB of RAM, but it is about the same size as the Swift X 14, so not as small as the Flow X13: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/asus-rog-zephyrus-g14-2023
A number of these also have user-upgradeable RAM, SSD, or both. I really like OLED, so it's great to see so many options for that, and MiniLED is going to be significantly more common this year than it was last year. It would be nice if my M2 MBA offered OLED or MiniLED.
But I'm still really concerned about the consistency of hibernation and sleep so I'm not taking a searingly hot machine out of my bag at 1% battery life. Or the weird quirks of some new hinge or keyboard design that I have to live with for 4+ years of owning a machine.
I'd honestly take half the specs and double the thickness/weight if it meant that my keyboard felt like a keyboard and that I can confidently close the lid at any time and re-open it back to whatever I was doing.
I don't _like_ Apple. But they can do that. And I don't even have to compromise on anything except using macOS (which I can tolerate).
Those have a huge tie in with the software, so I wouldn't expect hardware innovation to help.
I didn’t bother addressing those points because it’s hard to know where things were going wrong without a lot more detail.
Sleep issues are definitely a hallmark of Windows Modern Standby, but one might hope that will be addressed soon. Supposedly Microsoft is looking into it now.
Generally speaking HN's average knowledge on Hardware isn't exactly up to date to say the least.
The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they were slightly ahead.
...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
Sure, they’re all “Apple Silicon” but the chips should be compared to their equivalents, M-level with Intel/AMD and A-level with Snapdragon/Exonys. We don’t really compare Snapdragon to Core any other time, as they both optimize for vastly different things.
I would also argue that Apple is continuing to make big boosts in their A-level chips compared to their mobile counterparts.