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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

Was looking at purchasing a PC laptop for a staff member today and was surprised just how much better Apple products are in the current M generation of devices. Better screens, no fans, better battery, better performance … surprising there is not much competition. If you take a Dell XPS and add OLED screen and higher resolutions … quickly find your self near $2,000 with a device that still has less battery life, runs hotter, and although may match or exceed raw numeric performance … is still arguably not as versatile or as good a machine.

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The battery life alone is worth kitting out your team with them to be honest. My windows work laptop is dead in under 2 hours. My m1 mbp will last all day 8/9 hours + under normal loads. The only app that eats the batter is football manager and even then it lasts 3-4 hours.

Modern zen4 based laptops can get 15 hours. My 2019 MBP was quoted as 10 hours but gets under 2.... Why? because it's more software than hardware that is the issue. My MBP runs out of battery quickly because outlook (or chrome) uses too much CPU and it drains quickly and runs hot. You get the 10 hours only if then SW lightly loads the CPU. This is the same for Zen and appple Mx CPUs. If you run exactly the same apps you will get similar performance.... The modern zen are very efficient CPUs.

Usually for me the culprit for poor battery life is MS office apps, but under MacOS I've seen window manager consume 90% CPU regularly.

Long story short, buggy SW dictates battery life on modern laptops, with very little between apple and zen (can't speak to modern Intel CPUs, i dont have a laptop with one)

Your 2019 MBP is running Intel chips, not at all comparable to the 2020-onwards M processors. I also had a 2019 MBP kitted out as a work computer before and it barely lasted 3h on a normal workday (meetings, compiling code, running Docker, many, many tabs open on browsers, etc.); my work M1 Max lasts anywhere between 8-12h on a heavier workload than what I worked with in 2019 including all I mentioned in the parenthesis.

So yes, software is the culprit but the M-series are much better at managing the same software (and even heavier ones) that I run, for the same job.

I'm well aware it is Intel, but it was still sold at the time as a 10 hour battery life, and I'm sure it can be, when nothing is running but one tab of safari.

So my point was, and in agreement with you, is when using similar sw (buggy or not) a modern zen4 will have similar battery life to a M1 / M2

a 2019 mbp runs on intel though? it has massive power draw. that’s why you get 2 hours of battery life

Also, I can run Mixtral 8x22B right now on my MacBook. Highly capable, local, (preferably uncensored) models are phenomenal for my productivity. Nothing else comes close to matching Apple silicon's up to 192GB of VRAM for its price.

I agree the lowest specced fanless MacBook Air is very appealing at its price point. But for laptops with fans, if you want to do gaming or AI the performance of a laptop with Nvidia will blow away anything from Apple, and the 2024 version of the ROG Zephyrus G14 looks pretty good.

For gaming, absolutely; few enough games even run on OSX.

For AI, unified memory is _way_ cheaper than high-ram GPUs.

And catastrophically slower. I think a lot of people who are downloading llama.cpp to run on their M-series MacBook Pro or spending $$$ on high-RAM Mac Studios for AI are not actually aware that Nvidia GPUs are often literally ten times faster for the same applications. You'll almost always be better off either running on a local gaming GPU for things that fit or renting GPUs in the cloud for things that don't, just because the performance gap is so massive.

But OLED isn't an option on any MacBook model currently?

the miniLED on the 14” and 16” is honestly better for laptop purposes anyway

Excuse me but what does this have to do with the next gen AI chips topic?

Are there any threads left on HN that can be held on topic and not be invaded by the same ol' beaten to death "muh Apple M1 so good, PCs so bad" trope? It's been 4 years already since the M series launched, so unless people have been living under a rock, everyone already knows what they can do, what exactly were you bringing on this topic with your pointless shopping anecdote that has nothing to do with the topic?

And FYI, not everyone is a web dev. Many many jobs will require you to use tools exclusive to Windows or Linux hence why the market for expensive PC laptops is still very large despite being worse on paper than MacBooks.

MacOS doesn't solve everyone's needs no matter how good their chips are, if the SW you need doesn't run on it then it's useless, so Apple is no thereat to that market.

He's hoping for somebody to get a clue and build better PCs.

How is his comment helping the Intel engineers build better CPUs? Does he think that Intel and AMD already solved the immense challenges on how to design and build a better CPU but they were just waiting for roody15's low efort comment to finally give the green light to ship them?

> We vent online in pointless comments and poof, magic happens?

More than you might think. You never know who's reading.

So what if "they" read his comment? Do you think if Pat Gelsinger himself reads this, they'll just "engineer" faster now or what?

Apple seemed to manage just fine. You're saying there's nobody else out there that can do the same? And what's your solution? Suffer in silence? Or do you think yelling at other people on an online forum is somehow more productive?

>Suffer in silence?

You must live in some coo-coo land of privileged entitlement if you think that not using Apple M laptops somehow equivalate to "suffering". Go out and get some perspective on what suffering actually feels like. I'm ending my talk with you here since your comments are of even lower quality.

You know that's not what I meant. What do you think you're accomplishing here?

Yeah... hopefully the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips get integrated properly by someone so there's actual competition. Mobile data in my laptop also sounds like it would be pretty nice. Not holding my breath though, Microsoft may still mess it up on the Windows side :(

Lenovo and/or Qualcomm managed to mess things up enough on the Thinkpad x13s that the cellular connectivity was provided by a M.2 card rather than the Snapdragon SoC.

Macs are better but absurdly expensive and I've only ever had an awful customer experience with them. For a daily development laptop, I don't think it's worth the extra money over Lenovo and I don't want to support Apple.

I do think it would be cool to have an M_x chip to try and run ML stuff on.

For a daily development laptop, I actually find Mac OS incredibly superior to the alternatives, but I guess ymmv

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