Asus' first Snapdragon X Elite laptop (mostly) blows away the MacBook Air M3 | Hacker News Reader

Asus' first Snapdragon X Elite laptop (mostly) blows away the MacBook Air M3

tomsguide.com

35 pointsneogodless50 comments

The keyboard feel might be good according to the reviewer, but the layout (as with many other modern laptops) is poor:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/7/8/csm_...

Manufacturers need to stop putting the power button on the keyboard deck, you're one fat finger away from turning off your laptop by accident.

IMO, the old ThinkPad 7-row keyboard is still the gold standard.

The power button placement is a total non issue. It’s not like a single tap of the power button instantly powers off the laptop, usually it brings up a power menu with off/sleep/restart/logout options or locks the screen, and it takes a 5-second hold to hard power off.

I've got a laptop that the kids spilled some milk on. For the first time ever (in my experience), removing the keyboard and cleaning it with isopropyl alcohol made things worse. But there are no spare keyboard assemblies available from the manufacturer or elsewhere, and eBay only has buy-it-now options for parts-donor laptops at prices exactly equal to flawless laptops.

So now I have a perfectly fine (actually really nice) laptop with a malfunctioning keyboard that insists on constantly inserting phantom keypresses. My thought was to use the 3D printer at the library to create a new topcase and turn the thing into a SFF PC. Oh, well, except for that one thing: the power button is part of the keyboard assembly. So the whole thing is just e-waste now.

> Manufacturers need to stop putting the power button on the keyboard deck, you're one fat finger away from turning off your laptop by accident.

Action to take on power button press is configurable on every major OS, and to be honest very few people use it to turn the computer off.

I loathe this keyboard. Smashing a tiny tenkey onto there is just awful.

I think the question was always if the non-Apple world would finally, after all these years, get a valid M processor equivalent. The answer seems to be yes. And that's huge news.

I read this as ‘not yet’ - worse single core performance on a higher TDP with a fan, and conspicuously no GPU stats at all, just ‘it games fine’.

Perhaps it wins on neural workloads, but no details here.

To be clear, I would love a competitive chip because I’d like my next Apple chip to be better, and there’s so little competition that the m3 was considered a viable upgrade to the m2. But I don’t think this chip is going to press Apple to upgrade their minimum architectural specs. Hope I’m wrong though!

EDIT: okay for ‘equivalent’ I may agree with you. For ‘competitive/leapfrog’ I’m at not yet.

- It loses in single-core benchmark (2418 vs 3082)

- It wins in multi-core (14352 vs 12087) and transcode (6:50 vs 7:19) while requiring 4 more cores (12 vs 8 (4+4)) and active cooling

Where's the blowing away part?

I mean, it makes a better headline than "meh, it's kinda competitive", I suppose... But yeah, hard to characterise this as 'blowing away' (also a little suspect that they don't present a graphics comparison).

It’s dead in the water from my perspective. Tied to windows baggage, not actually faster, arm windows apps are… yeah not exactly vast in number.

> Where's the blowing away part?

That would be the active cooling.

the fan

Funny how they're only comparing these laptops (equipped with a fan) to a laptop with a fan-less design (MBA).

Yea, and the MacBook Air is 27.5% faster for single-core while the Snapdragon X Elite is only 18.7% faster for multi-core. It looks like the Qualcomm is also designed for 15% higher TDP wattage so it could simply be that Qualcomm went for more heat (possibly for bragging rights in benchmarks).

These laptops might end up being great, but Apple's M-series laptops aren't just fast. They feel hugely different to use than any Intel based laptop I've had. I think that people also underestimate the importance of single-core performance. Most workloads simply aren't well designed for multi-core and single-core performance is one reason that the iPhone is so nice to use.

Well, I think nobody can argue that Apple's tech is still better, but this is the first time someone was able to offer some competition that doesn't look like a joke in comparison to Apple's M series.

I would imagine they did it based on price range rather than presence of a fan. The cheapest Macbook Pro with a fan and the same amount of RAM and storage (16GB/1TB) is $2000, while the Asus only costs $1300.

Definitely a better showing from a higher end Samsung exclusive unit clocked at 4.2 Ghz. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40738902 (YouTube video linked).

  Geekbench 6 Single Core
  MacBook Air (M3)      3082
  Samsung Galaxy Book4  2838
  Surface Laptop 7      2765
  Asus Vivobook S 15    2418

  Geekbench 6 Multi-core
  Samsung Galaxy Book4  15351
  Asus Vivobook S 15    14352
  Surface Laptop 7      14220
  MacBook Air (M3)      12087

Though, oddly, the Surface did much better on battery than the Samsung. (Possibly bad choice of power plans.)

Further comparison betweeen the Surface Laptop 7 and Macbook Air (M3) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYGUG_2Oge8

  Cinebench Multi-core
  Surface Laptop 7      841
  MacBook Air (M3)      550

The Surface seemed to be about 4°C warmer on the surface (47 vs 43) in comparison during the Cinebench runs.

Ah... the famous "macbook killer", 2024 edition.

The more relevant comparison is to similarly priced Intel/AMD laptops, not the MacBook Air. And all these Copilot+ PCs have fans, so I think the 14” MacBook Pro is the more relevant comparison for a Mac.

Laptop with fan barely beats laptop without a fan on a 6 minute benchmark, more at 11.

The M3 is throttling and almost keeping pace, Tomshardware actually knows this since they have the Geekbench score for the M3 Macbook pro, which of course beats the X-elite.

It's a huge leap for Qualcomm, but I think the comparison is kind of ruined when its obviously been staged to thermal throttle and has parroted the same benchmarks that Qualcomm selected themselves...

That's a bit unfair when not including a fan for the ~same price point is a pretty harsh anti-consumer move I think.

err you pay to NOT have to listen to a fan

Then why is the fanless model, the Air, the cheapest laptop Apple is selling?

I happily pay extra for an MBA (vs an equivalent pc) because there is no fan noise

you pay for the right to feel smug and get thermal throttled if you open up too many chrome tabs.

smug, me? I am a SWE with a MBA and I never get thermal throttled. What am I doing wrong?

> Geekbench 6 single-core > Snapdragon X Elite 2418 > m3 3082

Tells you all you need to know about this chip. And I bet Microsoft's ARM Translation layer will be Garbage as usual.

I’m not seeing the numbers where it blows away the M3 myself, maybe I missed them? Some modest uptick over yesteryears part from Apple doesn’t blow me away.

I wouldn't buy a laptop with a 16:9 screen in 2024.

Plus it's OLED, so higher power use, psychological pressure to make everything black, and danger of burn-in.

And what's wrong with black particularly?

Some of us prefer black text on white background over white text on black background.

What I would like to know is how good the graphic drivers are. We had to deal with a ton of Intel Windows OpenGL driver issues in the last 10 years...

Competition is good. It means we will get better hardware from Apple maybe.

Competition is great, free markets are superb, agree.

I'm a big Apple fan and well into that ecosystem on every device from watch to desktop and everything in between, but I doubt that Apple will care, because customers like me don't care.

I don't buy a Macbook because of its performance vs a windows machine. I buy one because of its performance vs my old Macbook.

It's not just about the silicon. It's what Apple and its customers tout as "vertical integration" - I don't have to worry about drivers and chipsets and configuring things, it all just works. Apple isn't right for everyone, but they know who they're right for, and they're great at shipping product to them.

What will be interesting with the new Snapdragon chips is Linux and BSD support. I don't want or need Windows, or Copilot+, or any other MS nonsense. But if I can have a blazing fast FLOSS machine for a little less money than the MB[P]s with M3, it might turn my head, maybe.

I'm probably the target market on both ends. I've mostly worked off a MBP over the last 15 years, though currently coding on a Surface Book for compatibility reasons and generally avoid walled ecosystems as it feels unhealthy.

My personal laptop is an i7 11" MBA that works fine but is in dire need of a refresh. I've been eyeing a 16gb MBA; but have been hesitating as I really like the 11" form factor and things like Framework look really tempting. Now; Snapdragon is looking tempting.

I'll probably buy something this summer, glad to have options. That Yogi looks interesting.

If you're in the US and want to save a few bucks, check out the "Walmart MacBook Air M1". It should blow your i7 out of the water.

if you can stomach it the apple silicon macbook airs are really really nice. I do wish they'd bring back a 11 or 12 inch option but actually I super enjoyed the extra screen real estate of the 15 macbook air I just liked the macbook pro keyboard so much more I spent 2.5x or more on a macbook pro lol

I am seriously tempted. I've been back to my apt roots lately so I'm somewhat dreading the mess that is homebrew. I assume things are better now, it has been ~3 years.

I mean it’s not nix but it’s been fine for me. I’ve a typical setup. Python Java etc. I install things via brew and don’t look back. Pyenv for version mgmt.

Nixpkgs might be a better alternative if you’re really looking for multi version for everything.

I'm excited for Linux on these type of devices but a previous story today reported them as bootlocked. So we can't just take any old one and install Linux, it would have to be specific models.

M2 and M1 laptops are making great progress towards Linux by the Asahi folks. Many big things still missing but given that they are reverse engineering everything that they’ve made this much progress is insane to me.

Exactly ... I love my almost maxed out m3 macbook pro but if I can get one of these fast arm chips in a laptop with thinkpad level linux support I'd insta-buy yet another laptop.

A vendor page: https://uk.store.asus.com/asus-vivobook-s-153388-25323.html £1300.

Big minus point: Qualcomm. Also AI Windows 11. I wonder how (if?) this thing runs Linux.

> I wonder how (if?) this thing runs Linux.

See there: https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...

Should be good after all this has landed in upstream Linux and all the distros (which may take a bit of time, as usual).

As an interim, I really want to see WSL performance. Hopefully in the next few days we get some clarity there; not a really an MBA competitor for me until then.

> I wonder how (if?) this thing runs Linux.

Yes, there is a heavy and ongoing upstreaming effort.

https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...

I bought the Asus Vivobook S and was disappointed. Windows 11 Copilot was not what they demo'd and the emulation is still substandard. If I only wanted to run benchmarks, I would probably be happy, but I had hoped for a product that performed as advertised.

Why are they comparing a fan cooled 12 core laptop with a passive cooled 8 core laptop? This should be versus the MBP.

I think it’s reasonable to compare at the price point - $1300.

Sounds about right; similar spec'd MBP is ~2k currently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com