Ask HN: Desktop vs. Laptop with ARM/Apple Silicon | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Desktop vs. Laptop with ARM/Apple Silicon

11 points_ajoj26 comments

Would you buy a laptop for development if it sat on a desk 90% of the time?

I've always bought laptops but they spend 90% of the time on the desk. With Intel/AMD it may have been better to get a desktop for better TDP.

With ARM/Apple Silicon does that hold true?

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If price is not a concern I might recommend sticking to the laptop route. There is no noticeable performance gap on the Pro line with the fan (wife has an M2 Air and I definitely notice throttling in stuff like Lightroom)

I use a 14" M1 Max as my daily driver with an external monitor. I absolutely love the versatility. I run small video transcode jobs in Premiere/AME or render out things in After Effects daily and I never hear the fan or have any performance/heat issues of any kind. I am comparing this to my Win10 5950x/RTX 3080 desktop also at my desk and while that is definitely faster, I do not feel like my MBP is too far behind.

If cost is a factor I think the Mac Mini is the best bang for your buck. Especially if you still have access to a .edu (or just say you are in college) and knock an additional $100 off.

Did you consider the cooling mod for the M2 Air?

https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/11/m2-air-thermal-pad-mod/

Yep. The Mac Mini gives you more performance for your dollar, and opens up a world of peripheral choices, like a TV monitor or a mechanical keyboard.

But TBH the M1 and M2 family seem like a waste for programming workloads since they are so GPU heavy. Their niche is power efficient media manipulation.

I have been considering the Mac mini for DL/ML/AI work - seems Apple Neural Engine could be a good choice. But then again I'm not so sure.

It is good... but still not as fast as even a laptop 3060. You are kinda stuck with Nvidia unless AI on battery is an absolute top priority.

They made a huge difference in my programming workloads. The Max chip vs the Pro is mainly about GPU, but apple silicon is about everything

Yeah its an unbeatable laptop CPU, don't get me wrong, but its still not going to outrun a wide desktop/hedt cpu.

I run my tv as an external monitor from my M1 MBP via AirPlay

Rarely notice any issues doing so

My macbook pro spends 90% of the time on my desk, and I'm very glad it's so easy to move the rest of the time (sitting on the couch to do taxes, bringing it when I visit my parents, sitting outside at a coffee shop, etc). And knowing my environment will be exactly in the state I left it, instead of juggling two computers

But of course you pay a premium for that, so it depends on how much you want to spend

Last year, I bought Mac Mini instead of laptop based on same logic. Love it but really wish that I had stuck with laptops for those 10% of times.

There are times when I want to work from a different room or location. Unless budget is concern, I would get a laptop.

I wouldn’t buy an ARM desktop if the concern is TDP. You won’t see a benefit there. I would buy a desktop if you want more power at a lower cost, and you find it helps you to have one fixed place to do your work.

I know others would do it differently, but for me compiling speed was more important than low price or expandability so my choice was between M2 Max on a MacBook Pro and a M1 Ultra on a Mac Studio.

The profiling indicated those quite were close in performance so I went with the laptop. My main compromise was to choose 14in as it’s plugged into a monitor most of time so I could optimize for travel more than a big screen when the monitor isn’t there.

In the end I’m super happy with it. The M2 Max is a monster for compiling and is probably 5x faster for builds than my previous Intel-based MacBook Pro

My understanding is the Max/Ultra are mainly about increased GPU performance. Did you compare those against the M2 Pro beforehand?

Yes, they have the same cores but the memory bandwidth is double the speed: “M2 Pro’s memory maxes out at 32GB, but the M2 Max can handle as much as 96GB. And memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is double that on the M2 Pro”.

You can see here the M2 Pro got an 80 benchmark and the M2 Max, the line above the commit, got a 72 (arbitrary numbers, for sure, but a real difference!):

https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark/pull/393/comm...

Desktop all the way (provided you have money to spend).

1. Multi monitor support is way better on Desktop with discrete graphic card(s) . You can have high resolution + high refresh rate on all monitors. With Macs, only the M2Max chip has decent support, and limited to >100hz only on one monitor. I have 2 ultrawide 34 inch monitors on top of one another, and its fantastic having all the windows you need to be open shown. Im so used to this that I actively notice all the time I waste tabbing windows on the laptop.

2. Way easier to expand/modify/repair desktop.

3. You can get a small cheap laptop running linux for work/dev away from your desk, and then SSH into the desktop if you need processing power. With VSCode Remote SSH extension this works very well. The advantage to doing this is that a) if your laptop gets stolen on travel, you aren't losing work or much hardware and b) it gives you more options in terms of laptop choice (for example, I have one with a numpad because of scientific computing). For security, I use a t2.micro EC2 instance with SSH tunnels that I spin up when I im on travel.

AFAICT there's no noticeable difference in TDP between the desktop and laptop versions of Apple Silicon chips. There may be a difference in thermal cooling efficiency though, in which case you might want to check for online reviews on whether or how much load will lead to thermal throttling for the particular hardware you're considering.

It's worth checking, but the current MBPs have better cooling than previous generations and the Mini probably has more constrained cooling than a non-Mac desktop, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're comparable

In any case I've never heard my M1 MacBook Pro's fans except when I was running stable diffusion on it. The Airs can definitely throttle though

If you have the budget ´, get a desktop at home and a laptop for the other 10% of the time you travel or move.

If that 10% of the time you travel you must have a laptop with you and there’s only room in the budget for one or the other, then it seems like laptop is the logical choice.

My way of looking at it was always this. If having a laptop will tend to encourage me to do more work, I will choose the laptop. Please note that I work for myself, and I like working.

This was a very successful method for me, since the MacBook Air was introduced. I am absolutely much more likely to earn more money because it’s easy to carry around my main computer.

idk., but for software-development - in my case mostly good-old java - i would vote for an amd64 (desktop) PC every single time

just for example ... during one of my last years project i got a newish macbook - m1 max 32 gb ram:

* really annoying to setup - aarch64 / apple stupidities & for a linux-guy the "uncanny valley" which is the darwin cli + homebrew ... using some bash 3.x, from 2007 or 08 (!)

* my age-old amd 2400g apu / quad-core with 32 gb ram from 2018 was twice (!) as fast in compiling a decent-sized java-application on command-line with maven ... (in the ballpark of 2 to 3 minutes (amd64) vs 5 to 6 and up to nearly 7 minutes (m1))

(apples supplied ssd vs a samsung 970 evo 1 tb nvme ssd in a cheaper asrock b450 mainboard / pcie 3.0 ... current os X vs. current debian/bullseye :)

price comparison: what the overpriced apple macbook costs vs. a few 100 euros from your next pc-component dealer down the street ...

NO. I find desktop systems to be more expandable, easier to upgrade and repair. Besides the battery on a desk bound laptop seems to deteriorate faster than when used as intended.

These new Apple laptops don’t even bother charging the battery past 80% if you leave it deskbound long enough (default settings, you can change this if it bothers you, and you can tell it to charge to full at any time of course).

I’d be surprised if they even use the battery beside doing whatever conditioning is needed over time - if you keep it deskbound.

I think my pixel device does the same thing

Nice thing about using a laptop, makes a nice 3rd/2nd monitor in your setup if you use a dock. I use a dock and home and work, with nice big monitors.

My laptop sits on a desk >90% of the time

But it's not always the same "desk"

Desktop computers make sense for a bunch of use cases

Laptops make sense more many others

I've used the same setup for as long as finances have allowed, a mac laptop for travel and a windows/linux desktop for home.

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