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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

Depending on which model you are looking at, you cannot get a faster Intel or AMD machine. Also not for less money. The Apple ARM hardware is amazing. Running Linux natively on a fast RISC machine should make many people excited. Also a good long-term alternative when Apple stops supporting new releases of macOS on these machines.

While I like macOS as a "desktop" OS, I run also Linux on my Macs. So far in a VM, which obviously is very convenient. But I am certainly looking forward to installing Asahi.

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That's a very untrue set of statements.

Apple charges an absurd amount for tiny little features that real computers have in spades. Like RAM going for $200+ increments per 8GB, or $200+ increments per 512GB of SSD storage. That's almost offensive pricing if you know actual hardware costs. Why? Because Apple "Silicon" computers are not modular.

For a top end Apple M2 you're spending $2500 just to get feature parity with a $1000 PC and even then you're maxing out at a pathetic 2TB of storage and only 24GB of ram. If you built a $2500 PC it would absolutely, unequivocally, blow the highest end M2 out of the water in both performance (especially after thermal throttling on the M2) and ability to do computer task (ie, having more space than a Dell computer from 2006 which Apple M1/M2 products cannot).

I think most folks here are advocating for MacBooks, which you absolutely could not build or buy an equivalent of in the 1000$ range. Desktops are a different class of hardware altogether.

When the parent post spoke about "faster" I compared the CPUs. The Apple CPUs are very competetive the the top end x86 CPUs, especially in laptops.

Just to take on one of your points: the RAM you are talking about is not truly comparable. Sure, you can add DIMMs to a PC motherboard. M2 "unified" memory bandwidth to the on-chip RAM, LPDDR5-6400, exceeds 100Gb/sec. That's incredible bandwidth. So yes, there's a cost tradeoff, and the lack of modularity means the upgrade path is "get a new device." That's frustrating. That's actually been true of high end PCs for decades, given the constant churn in socket standards and power requirements, but fans of building their own PCs generally don't like to acknowledge it.

The criticism of the onboard flash is more valid - it's costly and if you don't get the dual bank setup, paying yes, a big premium like I did for a 512Gb version, performance isn't great. https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-... The lack of an upgrade path is, again, not great, but ask yourself honestly, aside from some ThinkPads which really were nicely upgreadable in the past, how many laptops are upgradeable and what can you upgrade?

Your bias ("Apple charges an absurd amount," for "tiny little features that real computers have in spades") is showing and it isn't pretty. Show us the modular laptop with comparable performance or shut up; you're stuck in the nineties.

Go on - find me a PC laptop that performs better than an M2 and let's look at prices, weight, and battery life. Oh, and modularity.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_proces...

Or even show us your PC build that is comparable to the Mac Studio and let's talk about how big, noisy, and power-hungry it is; these are things that people who want to use real computers in real offices and studios care about, more than PC hot-rodders who, let's face it, are mostly gamers bragging to each other about their frame rates rather than professionals using computers as tools.

A 7950X capped to 65W is around 40% faster than an M1 Ultra. Capped to 105W it's almost 50% ahead (according to CPUMark).

For a workstation there is no comparison in terms of either performance or price. (Mac does have the high-bandwidth unified memory going for it which can make a difference in some situations.)

Yes, there are configurations where a PC is a way better machine for the money, especially where Apple doesn't offer a directly comparable alternative. However, that doesn't mean, this applies in general, especially with laptops rather Apple is ahead of the game. So it varies by category and configuration.

It will be interesting to see whether Apple can continue with M3s, etc. I think they are facing pretty hard process limitations and I'm not sure that adding parallelism will get them huge gains on normal workloads, so they may be stuck at a plateau for a while, but we'll see.

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