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Comment by throwaway11460 | Hacker News Reader

2x better performance per watt is not interesting? Wow, what a time to be alive.

To me, cutting wattage in half is not interesting, but doubling performance is interesting. So performance per watt is actually a pretty useless metric since it doesn't differentiate between the two.

of course efficiency matters for a battery-powered device, but I still tend to lean towards raw power over all else. Others may choose differently, which is why other metrics exist I guess.

This still means you can pack more performance into the chip though - because you're limited by cooling.

Huh, never considered cooling. I suppose that contributes to the device's incredible thinness. Generally thin-and-light has always been an incredible turnoff for me, but tech is finally starting to catch up to thicker devices.

Thin and light is easier to cool. The entire device is a big heat sink fin. Put another way, as the device gets thinner, the ratio of surface area to volume goes to infinity.

If you want to go thicker, then you have to screw around with heat pipes, fans, etc, etc, to move the heat a few cm to the outside surface of the device.

That's not why thin-and-light bothers me. Historically, ultrabooks and similarly thin-and-light focused devices have been utterly insufferable in terms of performance compared to something that's even a single cm thicker. But Apple Silicon seems extremely promising, it seems quite competitive with thicker and heavier devices.

I never understood why everyone [looking at PC laptop manufacturers] took thin-and-light to such an extreme that their machines became basically useless. Now Apple is releasing thin-and-light machines that are incredibly powerful, and that is genuinely innovative. I hadn't seen something like that from them since the launch of the original iPhone, that's how big I think this was.

That's not exactly true, just the other day Snazzy lab complained about a MBP M3 Max throttling and making a lot of fan noise.

Those are barely competitive with the heavier but more powerful gaming/creation laptops Apple's aficionados keep deriding (if it has a 4090 it's not even competitive).

They have focused on mobility (power consumption and size) at the cost of everything else.

For this exact reason their desktop offering is really not competitive with offering around the same prices in the PC world. The only thing they do better is size (considering you can make a 3-4L top of the line PC; the Mac Studio isn't even impressive) and power consumption. But who actually cares, even if using a desktop heavily its consumption is dwarfed by most other use in a typical house, so whatever?

Thin and light are indeed a small use case overall and people who care about that have a ton of decently good options in the PC world already. It's not like the performance per watt benefits of Apple Silicon is really that relevant to most potential customers. If one is content enough with such a laptop, using it for the typical light task, thin and light PC laptops are just small enough, silent enough and have good enough battery life for the most part.

It means a lot to me, because cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants (in aggregate). It’s the same as lightbulbs; I’ll never understand why people bragged about how much power they were wasting with incandescents.

>cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants

It is well known that software inefficiency doubles every couple years, that is, the same scenario would take 2x as much compute, given entire software stack (not disembodied algorithm which will indeed be faster).

The extra compute will be spent on a more abstract UI stack or on new features, unless forced by physical constraints (e.g. inefficient batteries of early smartphone), which is not the case at present.

That's weird - if software gets 2x worse every time hardware gets 2x better, why did my laptop in 2010 last 2 hours on battery while the current one lasts 16 doing much more complex tasks for me?

Elsewhere in the comments, it is noted Apple's own estimates are identical despite allegedly 2x better hardware.

Aside, 2 hours is very low even for 2010. There's a strongly usability advantage for going to 16. But going from 16 to 128 won't add as much. The natural course of things is to converge on a decent enough number and 'spend' the rest on more complex software, a lighter laptop etc.

They like bright lights?

I have dimmable LED strips around my rooms, hidden by cove molding, reflecting off the whole ceiling, which becomes a super diffuse, super bright “light”.

I don’t boast about power use, but they are certainly hungry.

For that I get softly defuse lighting with a max brightness comparable to outdoor clear sky daylight. Working from home, this is so nice for my brain and depression.

First, only CPU power consumption is reduced, not other components, second, I doubt tablets contribute significantly to global power consumption, so I think no power plants will be turned off.

That's bullshit. Does that mean they could have doubled battery life if they kept the performance the same? Impossible.

Impossible why? That's what happened with M1 too.

But as someone else noted, CPU power draw is not the only factor in device battery life. A major one, but not the whole story.

Intel to M1 is an entire architectural switch where even old software couldn't be run and had to be emulated.

This is a small generational upgrade that doesn't necessitate an event.

Other companies started having events like this because they were copying apples amazing events. Apples events now are just parodies of what Apple was.

You know the main point of the event was the release of new iPads, right?

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