Hacker News Reader

Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

I really wish that "elite" LLM folks like yourself or many others in the field would just abandon apple/mac.

Yes, they make better laptops from a hardware perspective. No, M series chips are not actually competitive with Nvidia hardware on anything except cheap (and relatively slow) inference of big models.

The fact that windows laptops are considered DOA despite the insane amount of inertia behind Nvidia GPUs is just sad. I want a world where Dell/Lenovo can actually convince folks like you or other "elites" to use their shit. The XPS should be a better laptop than the macbook pro. Yet, I have to watch as the technical elites fawn over a company which continues to sell a starting level un-upgradable laptop with 8gb of ram and a gimped "SSD" in 2024 (this was criminal to do back in 2018) all because other companies can't make a good keyboard or touchpad.

I have a similar old-man yelling at cloud tier rant about the slow death of X86...

View on HN

> The XPS should be a better laptop than the macbook pro.

Except its.. not. I'm a longtime windows/linux user who recently switched to mac, and my mac somehow manages to get better performance out of the same specs while lasting 2x longer on battery. In my price range, there is no competition on price:performance:battery.

XPS are horrible though. Native linux support is almost literally the only redeeming quality.

> all because other companies can't make a good keyboard or touchpad.

The whole point of a laptop is to have integrated input and display. Why wouldn't you expect the laptops with the best displays and input devices to be the most popular?

> all because other companies can't make a good keyboard or touchpad

Or screen, sound, battery life, cooling, weight...

Are MBPs the best possible configuration out there? Of course not. But they're just much better _mobile devices_ than anything else available.

You pretty casually dismiss the value of being able to run big models, when it's literally impossible on a mobile Geforce in a lot of cases since they max out at 16GB!

I don't do LLM so I can't comment there. But in general, devs/pros would use windows/linux laptops if they could. All we get is crappy build quality or bad battery endurance or bad performance (CPU or super basic stuff like the touchpad etc) or bad software.

macbook pros are by far the best device you can get for running local llms. first of all nvidia gpu's have extremely limited vram relative to the 100+gb afforded to macbook pros. second you cant take an llm server on the subway with you.

until you can show me small nvidia laptop with 128gb of vram and 20 hours of battery life, i'll keep using my macbook.

Nvidia's laptop range isn't all that impressive, really the magic is in the 3090/4090 desktop cards where they're hitting a magic trifecta of power+memory+value.

As absurd as it is I just built a PC with a 3090 at both home and work for training and inference then carry around a MBP for everything else.

> No, M series chips are not actually competitive with Nvidia hardware

Integrated memory is important, since CPU <-> GPU bandwidth is often a limiting factor

They would run from Mac when nvidia offers a 128gb or 512gb laptop offering.

Until then it’s meaningless to even consider windows (laptop)

There are a lot of "power users" that refuse to realize that they simply will never be in Apple's target market. They love Apple so much for cosmetic reasons, for wanting to be in the "in-crowd" reasons, or for whatever the fanboy reason, that they can't see the writing on the wall. Apple is not making hardware for their use cases, and likely never will again.

Most of the world is x86/Windows machines, developers included. I would bet that for every MacBook issued there's at least a hundred Precision/Latitude/ThinkPad/Optiplex machines that went into someone's hands. The Apple hard-on is from a specific region and culture where the technical "elites" have made a bajillion dollars working on shitty phone apps and other such light work where it's possible for your trackpad/keyboard to be the biggest issue. It sounds a bit mean-spirited, but I think it's pretty telling that as the gravity of the work increases, you see less and less Apple products being used to do it.

No, it isn't mean-spirited at all. A lot of lucrative software development has been based around fairly trivial software, all things considered. The barrier to entry was dramatically reduced, the resources required for development were too, and the option to choose your favourite hardware became an option. I think some people might be offended by that, but the variation of required hardware goes in all kinds of directions. Look at working on firmware vs the web, for example. You'll probably encounter a ton of friction on a mac if you get into robotics.

> It sounds a bit mean-spirited, but I think it's pretty telling that as the gravity of the work increases, you see less and less Apple products being used to do it.

it does sound like envy. I hate macos post 10.8ish myself, but the hardware is pretty solid. my 12 year old Mac book air would be enough for my work although I have to use a windows laptop issued by work. I don't want to dox myself, but I'd say my work is of international interest even though it's quite niche.

There's definitely some envy -- the hardware is beyond solid. It's definitely bordering on the best there is if it isn't already there. macOS as a computing environment is just too far off the beaten path in too many ways to realistically deal with, which is why Windows absolutely dominates everything everywhere that isn't Bay Area web-based software companies. Not to say that Windows is particularly good, but for most people that actually need to drop $2500+ on a computer, it's probably better.

There's still an awful lot of Mac around.

It's very common in networking, sysadmin/devops, and web development in the UK, for instance. I go to a reasonable number of industry events and MacBooks are definitely the majority at these.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com