What is crazy is how Apple was able to steal the thunder from all, intel, amd, qualcomm, etc. I really wish the PC (non-apple) world steps up, because I don't like macOS at all, and I don't like to pay the Apple prices either.
That's probably why ARM is suing them, they potentially could create designs that make ARM's designs obsolete and are likely to take ARM's market (unlike Apple).
ARM suing them was simply because they are using a contract tailored for Server market and using it in Smartphone.
Either way, it's bad when the ISA owner is limiting what you can develop to suit its own profits. This is the problem RISC-V solves.
In other words, if like me, you roll your eyes every time apple announces some "innovative" new feature other platforms have had for years, just let the fans have their moment.
It started literally falling apart in 6 months. One of the usb ports stopped working, the disc tray was stuck, the bottom left of the trackpad was sunken in, and the whole laptop felt cheap and was plastic. A ton of flex in the whole thing.
The worst experience I had with an aluminum mac was dropping it while open and having the screen shatter.
It's a shame that IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo. Maybe it's just the model I have, but Lenovo's ThinkPads feel so much worse in quality than IBM's ThinkPads. I probably won't get another one when the time comes to replace mine.
That said, I'll consider a Framework or Starbook next time because even T series Thinkpads are getting thinner and bendier and the keyboards lower and worse.
There's a bunch of other series that are newer, consumer-oriented and do not share the body or traits that the Thinkpad series is reputable for.
That said, if I was in the market for a laptop today, I'd look at Framework.
An x395 bought in 2019 is my daily driver. It's as new.
The M2 Air is astonishingly light, while being made of metal, as opposed to the ThinkPad's (cheap imo, but subject to debate) plastic. Don't see what the argument is.
My point isn't that Airs are bad, but that they're not ideal for some tasks and saying any machine is "the best" without mentioning what you're using it for is less useful of a statement than you might think it is.
Thinkpads basically look the same for 10+ years.
But for me, the worst part is the non-choice. In the PC world, you can choose 10000 different PCs.
Again, I really admire the M1/M2, and the quality of apple products. But I returned an M1 on my previous job because of what I said above, and went to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Apple is a bit like a pre-curated menu.
It looks like Apple's biggest lead is the TSMC node advantage and their ARM license. And they're not the only ones with access to TSMC fabs and ARM specifications...
That max wattage of the 3080 laptop variant (just the GPU) is ~5x of Apple's CPU and GPU combined.
For reference, I'm using OpenCL and raster benchmarks from Blender to draw my comparison. Seems like the fairest common ground: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?group_by=devi...