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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

> other x86 and ARM manufacturers are making substantial improvements that are shortening Apple's lead

x86 has fundamental issues that I believe prevent it from ever achieving the MIPS per watt efficiency of anything from ARM. I mean... the newest M4 laptop will have a 24 hour battery life. That exceeds anything remotely possible in the same laptop form factor but with x86 by nearly an order of magnitude.

So now you're talking just ARM. Linux has been compilable on ARM for a while now, so where are the competing ARM laptops that are anywhere close to the power of Apple's version of ARM?

I do get what you're saying though (I'm definitely a Linux fan and have a Linux Framework laptop), but I wish it wasn't an x86 laptop because its battery life is crap (and that is sometimes important).

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> so where are the competing ARM laptops that are anywhere close to the power of Apple's version of ARM?

Better question: where are the incentives for them to make it? Apple is pretty much the only company with an outstanding architectural license to design ARM cores, and the best off-the-shelf ARM core designs don't even compete with 5-year-old x86 ones. If you're a company that has Apple-level capital and Apple-tier core design chops, you might as well embrace RISC-V and save yourself the ARM licensing fee. That's what Nvidia does for many of their GPU SOCs.

If SoftBank offered ARM licenses under more attractive terms, there would be genuine competition for good ARM CPUs. Given that Apple has a controlling stake in SoftBank, I wouldn't hold out faith.

> Apple is pretty much the only company with an outstanding architectural license to design ARM cores

Many other companies have done this to great effect in the past, but in recent years it has become more common to just license one of ARM's own stock cores, instead of designing your own from scratch.

This follows a period where companies like Qualcomm and Samsung were still trying to roll their own core designs from scratch, but ending up with designs that were slower and less power efficient than the cheaper stock cores you could license from ARM.

> the newest M4 laptop will have a 24 hour battery life. That exceeds anything remotely possible in the same laptop form factor but with x86 by nearly an order of magnitude.

Honestly, why is this such an appealing feature? Are you often away from an outlet for 20+ hours?

I use 6+ year old laptops that last 4 hours at most on a single charge, even after a battery replacement. Plugging them in every few hours is not a big inconvenience for me. If I'm traveling, I can usually find an outlet anywhere. It's not like I'm working in remote places where this could even be an issue.

Then there's the concern about fan noise and the appeal of completely silent computers. Sure, it's a bit annoying when the fan ramps up, but again, this is not something that makes my computers unbearable to use.

And finally, the performance gap is closing. Qualcomm's, AMD's and Intel's latest chips might not be "M4 killers" (or M3, for that matter), but they're certainly competitive. This will only keep improving in 2025.

24hrs of web/office is a work day of something more intense, or a few hours of something crazy.

It's not that these are must-haves: it's that it removes any such anxiety about these to begin with. I can take the laptop with me wherever I'm going, and not have to worry about charging it, or that the heat will make it unbearable to use on my lap, or that the fan will be noticeable. It means I can work at a cafe, in a car, on a bus, on a train, on a flight without power, and not have to worry.

And these things compound, as the other poster mentioned: 24 hours of light use means longer heavy use, which actually does matter to me. I often move around while using the MacBook because it's good to change up my (physical) perspective - and it means I can do that without the charger while hammering every core with rustc.

Once you see that better things are possible, it's very hard to go back to the comparatively terrible performance-per-watt and heat generation of equally powerful x86 laptops.

> Once you see that better things are possible, it’s very hard to go back

Yeah, there’s something a bit freeing about being able to go all day or more without charging. Just not needing to think about power or charging when you’re busy focusing on other things.

I’m glad other manufacturers got a bit of pressure to catch up as well. Now people come to expect laptops to just run for days at a time without charging.

I'm not saying that these things are not appealing. I would certainly like to enjoy them as well. But there are always compromises.

With Apple, you first have to pay whatever exorbitant price they want to charge you. The Air is relatively affordable, but bump up the specs on a MBP and your eyes will start to water.

That's fine. You get what you pay for, right?

Except now you're stuck in their walled garden and have to pay the same tax for overpriced accessories, software, and anything else they decide to charge you for.

OR you go the Asahi route and live with the stress and uncertainty of depending on a small team of contributors to keep your machine running. I already experience this stress with Linux on supported hardware, and couldn't imagine what it would be like if the hardware had to be reverse engineered for this to work.

That said, I'll probably end up buying a used MacBook Air just to follow the progress of Asahi. If nothing else I'll have a more informed opinion the next time this discussion is brought up.

Over years, I've worn laptops (with sealed-in batteries) down to three-ish reliable hours. There are never enough power outlets (or AC vents or even seats at the table) for a big meeting. That's a problem for a very long meeting format like a war room or a promo committee.

That's why you throw a couple of multi outlets in the drawer or a cabinet in that room.

Tech companies wire rows of desks for laptops and big monitors, but I think it'd be hard to find a meeting room where you could safely plug in more than a dozen 140 W chargers.

You probably can, as that's the max power, not the used power. To consume that much power you'd have to compile something with all the cores, and do something with the gpu (some rendering?), while the battery is being charged. And even then, I think there's a margin still on the power rating. (Running on solar, so I keep close eyes on my devices consumption). I believe most outlets are rated for 15+ amps, which is 1.8kW per receptacle (120v).

With all due respect I think this is a "640k is enough for everyone" problem, in the sense that you don't realize what something enables because you're simply so used to not having it:

1) Internet cafes that removed outlets to encourage laptop people not to squat :)

2) Airports where you can sit anywhere you want instead of just near an outlet

3) Airplanes when the power doesn't work (has happened more than once in my experience)

4) Cars, trains, subways, buses

5) My boat, sometimes I like to work from it for a change of pace

6) Don't have to hunt for an outlet when my fam is at the grandparents' house

7) I can work on my deck without dragging a power cord out to the table

8) I can go to a pretty overlook and watch the sunset while working

9) Conference rooms, don't have to deal with the hassle

10) Libraries, same thing. I can sit outside or in the stacks (quieter there) instead of only in the reading room (those tables are the only ones with power, in my local library)

11) Power outs and just other situations where you lose power for a time

12) It's extra juice to power your phone off of (or anything else)

I'm certainly forgetting more examples.

Some of those things would be nice, sure, but it comes down to the question of whether they're worth trading for using a computing platform tightly controlled by single corporation.

macOS is a deal-breaker for me, whether I use it in a cubicle or on a boat.

So the only alternative is Asahi Linux, which has its own set of drawbacks.

Clearly we must have different priorities, which is fine. Just don't think that yours are somehow superior to mine.

I own a Framework NixOS laptop (the newest one), a System76 Thelio NixOS beast (ryzen threadripper), and various Apple stuff. (And a Prometheus XVII Windows gaming laptop and an M1 MBP that I'm selling on eBay right now.)

So I completely get where you're coming from, because it's not a mutually-exclusive thing with me. As a software dev, I love open-source stuff!

I did just order the M4 Max Macbook Pro with maxed-out specs though, because I like to work on locally-running machine-learning stuff

Apparently Qualcomm's new ARM laptops are pretty close.

However I think ARM platforms tend to be way less open source friendly than x86, at least on mobile. Maybe the laptops are better because they have to run Windows and Microsoft probably wouldn't put up with the shit vendors pull on Android. I don't know.

Except that ARM just cancelled Qualcomm's chip design license, so... oopsy

We might not know if it's a valid cancellation for another few months and many millions of lawyer dollars.

I wouldn't be surprised if Arm is strongarmed into playing hardball with Qualcomm by Apple itself.

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