x86 lives on desktop now. Windows, Intel, AMD and Nvidia have more or less thrown in the white flag and given the laptop market to Apple.
If you just bother to open your eyes just a little bit wider you would notice that there is a huge market for Chromebooks, budget laptops, gaming laptops, mobile workstations, ultrabooks for students, gamers, business people, bankers etc. New things are happening every month. We are seeing more efficient laptops from Intel and AMD. Companies like Framework are doing actual innovations in the decade old laptop area. And there are workflows that can only be done on Windows.
Your claim is completely unfounded.
That said, I am not terribly interested in ARM-based laptops for now. Yes, they may be more energy efficient and all but that hardly matters to me compared to just having the same x86 architecture I run on my desktop and servers. That sweet binary-compatibility means less headache.
People underestimate the advantages that CPU architecture monoculture gave us, though they are getting admittingly less important year by year. Maybe one day I am going to run an ARM laptop or even RISC-V.
1. Apple's chips are so far beyond everything else that it makes obvious sense for Apple only. Snapdragon is at least 30% slower single core while having worse Performance per watt.
2. Apple wasn't playing fair with their translation layer. The Rosetta layer cheats a little because apple also made the chip. The secret sauce is that the M1 has a hardware compatibility mode (That technically breaks ARM spec) for x86 memory order that basically gives near 1:1 performance.
3. Microsoft heavily botched their ARM rollout (again. Hello, Windows RT). The translation layer on W10/11 is just bad, not because of bad coding but just the technical limits of what they were trying to do.
4. Google is in a great place with ARM compatibility in Chrome OS as the only consumer-facing apps are either built-in or on the play store...which was designed for ARM in the first place. Problem is that nobody will give them a good chip for ChromeOS and the focus is on low end, so Mediatek is just cruising.
ARM is a great arch...but right now it is Apple VS x86, not ARM.
The conclusion is on the ball but only current. M1 has been a bit old now and if other arm vendor and the two major architecture (ibm power for mainframe … cannot be counted) it is at least x86-32 plus x86-64 vs arm vs apple.
It's not bad at all, however Intel patents heavily restricted the initial implementation, to the point they couldn't ship the 64bit emulation. Apple decided to wait out the patents.
It does not (or it wouldn't be there) and they aren't the only ARM vendor with TSO (Fujitsu also does it.)
Their cores break the ARM spec in other ways too. Added instructions for AMX, new guard privilege modes, HCR_EL2.E2H can't be disabled, GPRs are clobbered on WFI, etc.
Yep! For me, it's the same ARM64 architecture I run on my desktop and servers[1]. :-)
Hetzner's offering is very competitive, cheaper than their already rock-bottom x86 offerings. Then there's AWS Graviton, Oracle with their free tier (not sure how expensive that gets if you actually have to load it) and both Azure and Google also have ARM offerings.
[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2023/05/setting-up-hetzner-arm-i...
People also oversell it, I never had any problem developing software for Windows 2000/NT, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Symbian, from my x86 desktop.
In the server market, just an estimated 8% of CPU shipments in 2023 were ARM.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/arm-based-pcs-to-nearly... https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20230217VL209/amd-arm-digiti...
It doesn't seem like a Rosetta 2-like effort is making it into mainline Linux anytime soon, if ever.
qemu-x86_64 is probably the closest there is to Rosetta; it works fairly well and I think conceptually it's identical or similar to Rosetta, but I don't really know what the performance is like, and it's of course not as integrated/automatic as Rosetta.
On Windows, ARM products just suck. The product is just bad because there is no reason to use it. The chips available are worse than x86 and then the software issue is bad due to a whole set of reasons that Microsoft can't change on their own..\ Google has that last 10% probably, ChromeOS moves ARM devices all day, every day. Just cheap ones.
- ethernet port
- hdmi port
- multiple usb A and C ports
- solid keyboard
Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I work for a large financial services company and receive a MacBook Pro for my work.
My work laptop battery can handle all-day IntelliJ & web browsing without charging, I've never heard the fan and the laptop stays cool. It has a Geekbench multicore score of 13,649.
My personal laptop also lasts that long and stays cool, and doesn't even have a fan.
I haven't actively used Windows since 2008. It's such an obnoxious OS to use, and I have never seen a Windows laptop with quality in the same zip code as a Mac. There's always a terrible touch pad, keyboard flex, plasticky trash fit and finish, mediocre display or something that just ruins the whole thing.
What are your issues? I have a T490 that is a few years old and its great for my use. But I keep it docked in to a monitor and external mouse and keyboard 90% of the time.
In terms of build quality, apple laptops are pretty good, but I can't stand macOS and apple keeps fucking with their ports.
My Inspiron 16 has a good glass screen and a pretty solid aluminum body. It's got all the ports I want (HDMI, USB-A 3.0, SD card reader, USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack). Personally, the macbook pro my company issued me is one of my least favorite laptops I've ever used. I also had compatibility or performance problems with x86 based software when I got my first M1 macbook, I don't know if they're improved anything since then
You might want to modernize your perception of it, holding on to 15 year old views is not a very smart move in the tech industry.
Windows 10 and 11 are a joy to use, and to develop. I used a Mac for 15 years and switched to Windows to develop 5 years ago, and now macOS looks extremely antiquated and creaky for development.
Development work strikes me as maybe the least distinguishing kind of task to compare them on. Very few hard choices to make unless you're developing for Mac or iOS.
The windows UI itself is an unpolished joke that's a hodgepodge of things that haven't been touched since Windows XP and half-baked new things, with sad window management (ironic) that lacks the perfection of Exposé and Spaces. To say nothing about laptop battery life, plugging in and removing multiple monitors several times a day.
I would strongly consider not working somewhere if they didn't use Macs
I'm the guy who has to come up with a workaround, but it's never a problem for others. Usually I'm translating some bash command into powershell, which takes maybe 2 minutes. Everything else runs just fine, and I don't even need to use WSL. Windows is a perfectly viable development platform, if you give a shit about learning the differences between a unix-like environment and windows instead of just copping out and using WSL
2. Complain when the macOS-oriented process doesn't work for everyone.
Installing Postgres, Redis, etc. on Windows is wildly complicated compared to on macOS or Linux.
Your Linux devs are just used to dealing with it.
Why would this be the case?
Dev environments should concentrate on a single platform as much as possible.
Yes because no one that you know buys an Apple laptop that must mean that Apple isn’t selling any…
> Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I find the lack of self awareness…amusing.
Because no one you know uses a Mac laptop, that must mean no one uses one.
Well my anecdote from working at the second largest employer in the US that the vast majority of technical people prefer Macs even though they can choose Macs or Windows.
I don't expect either x86 or Windows to go away any time soon – in general I think x86 has been somewhat unfairly maligned, and for most applications (including laptops) it works pretty well and is even the best available choice. I would prefer to say "diversification" or "the existence of actual competition" rather than "decline", as that doesn't imply it's going away.
But yet Apple is selling millions. Someone must see it as a viable experience.
The parent poster said
> would never buy an Apple laptop and no one I know has one either
What relevance then was there in the statement that the original poster made?
> Apple dominates the laptop market, which is a pretty ridiculous claim since x86 is still the vast majority of laptop sales and Windows is still the dominant laptop OS.
Nor did I argue otherwise. I merely called out the silliness of the statement that because the parent poster “doesn’t know anyone who owns one” or that because every developer he knows uses a Windows laptop, that his anecdotal experience has any relevance.
> I would never buy an Apple laptop and no one I know has one either.
>no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I don’t know anyone that uses WeChat. Wouldn’t that be a silly argument?
And the first link is
https://www.patentlyapple.com/2023/02/apple-currently-owns-9...
It would be much more substantial than anecdotal what his friends and coworkers do.
It’s about as bad as the old Slashdot “do people still watch TV? I haven’t own a TV in 10 years”
If you want to read a non-silly thread, I suggest looking for a non-silly opener, this website has more than average of those.
EDIT: It's funny to see this downvoted. I'm literally speaking of my particular use case and needs! Are there people who believe Apples are better in all scenarios?
For any program that is open, even if it hasn't been in use for a while, I click it once, and it comes to the forefront immediately.
For programs that are not open, I click it once, and then if I wait for it to launch, it appears in the forefront. If I immediately click back over to my web browser and begin using it before the program launches, it does not appear in the forefront... because I interacted with another program after starting the launch.
On Windows you can, say, click once to pause on a video playing in a browser window that doesn't have focus but is visible. On macOS, it's two clicks, because you have to focus the app first.
I don't care for the behavior but it's so minor to me that it carries essentially no weight.
It doesn't particularly bother me one way or the other to the point I didn't even think of this, despite also being a daily Windows users on my desktop computer.
The only thing it is actually missing from your list is Ethernet and usb a
I haven't needed an ethernet port on a laptop since the mid 2000s troubleshooting why my newly installed stack of Cisco switches weren't working, and that sort of use cases is rare enough that having a dongle seems fine.
Conversely, about 80% of the people I know use Apple laptops for work.
I don't see ethernet ports making a comeback on thin laptops anytime soon though. They are handy for LAN parties, so bulky gaming laptops will keep shipping with them, but for everyone else it makes more sense to leave that functionality to a dock.
On a desktop (which these days isn't a tower) I do want some of those features, and I get them.
* except kbd, and I find the apple kbds just fine -- I even survived a couple of rounds of the infamous "butterfly" kbds. But I know some people were unhappy and eventually Apple got their act together.
Furthermore their market share has never been over 20% of units shipped[1]
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...
I guess like me I like macbook 12 and that is what you use for non-desktop like notebook.
It's impossible to find a use case for the thing. I might have to sell it.