Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.
I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.
The amount of cooling and power required for such a PC versus the aluminum slab with small fans that almost never turn on is a testament to the insanely good engineering of the M series chips.
I compile large c++ codebases on a daily basis, but the M3 Max never makes me feel like I can “grab a cup of coffee”.
Nowadays I am looking forward to the Nvidia digits+ MacBook Pro duo.
I honestly looked for alternatives when I bought it last summer but there weren’t any competitive options.
AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...
It is true though that in terms of laptops my only experience to compare it with was with intel chips, but that's because it used to be hard to find an AMD laptop back then.
Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.
The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background.
On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes.
On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes.
Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.
It’s bigger problem was it was far too eager to trigger the dGPU, especially with accelerated graphics in browsers and the like. So I ended up running it in integrated only mode, unless I wanted to play games.
If I close my lid with 100% battery at the end of the workday, I should be able to open it up the next morning and get at least a few hours of work in before the battery dies.
And this used to work.
But with the same laptop, a certain version of windows has basically eliminated any benefits of shutting the laptop hinge.
Heck the worst part is the same thing happens even if you shut down windows. The only reason it’s now become usable for me is because I learnt if you do shift + power off that does a real shutdown, unlike a regular shutdown.
How on earth are there literally ZERO non Apple laptops with a trackpad as smooth as Apple’s?
This is an old technology. Surely someone must have reverse engineered this by now?
My guess is typical PC manufacturers have not felt it worth the time to invest in getting this aspect right.
Ironically, the best non windows trackpad I ever used was when Vizio tried to make computers. They actually got the trackpad right. In fact, those computers were really cut above everyone else, but my guess is they didn't sell well because they were taken off the market almost as fast as they were introduced
Apple has also learned a ton about how to do this well from the iPhone.
For example, the Precision touchpad, which was the first actual touchpad tech MS created, with Windows previously testing touchpads as mouses, has been released for a little more than a decade.
Touchpads had been around for over 4 decades and have been standard to laptops since the mid to late 90s.
And the worst part is that MS still allows hardware vendors to ship non Precision touchpads today.
MS won’t allow you to run windows 10, but vendors can ship touchpads that only support decades old software.
It’s very hard to get Windows manufacturers to pay attention to the touchpad when MS itself isn’t interested.
Unfortunately, the Windows domination in the non Apple part of the industry means that serious change is only driven by MS.
A lot of advantages we think Apple has due to vertical integration are more because MS is pretty terrible
Microsoft tried to prevent crapware from being installed by OEMs a while back and got blocked.
What you’re describing is the effect of not controlling the stack and the only way to really do that is by doing it yourself.
Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices
Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores
Apple does have some serious competition now
If RAM is all you need on a M_ air type of machine sure, but the selling/buying point of apple silicon's unified memory is mainly around GPU/memory bandwidth at a low energy consumption level, which is yet to be rivaled (maybe AMD recently took steps towards there). If one's workload optimises for CPU-only and very high RAM, apple silicon was and probably will be the worst choice cost-wise.
Also, for me, the no-no reason for snapdragon x elites until now is having to use windows, plus, as it turned out, the early unreliability of the actual products sold by laptop manufacturers.
But the market has opened up, so prob we will see more competition towards there, which is great. Apple's good but not doing anything magic that others cannot eventually do to some extent. Though I am far more optimistic for AMD than Qualcomm tbh.
What brand?
2k buys you a decent thread ripper or 59xx series and as much ram as you can throw at it.
I bought the system mostly to increase the single core performance from the Ryzen 5 3600 I had before. As well as to get rid of all the little 256GB SSD disks I had in the previous one.
Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.
That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.
I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.
My M1 still holds right up! It is the smallest RAM model, and even that is not the end of things.
I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.
Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.
I could get 7+ hours from my work Linux laptops battery and I don’t really care for macOS. The OS quality matters more than the touch pad to me. I’ve come the appreciate a Mat screen. But im glad there is choice.
EDIT: Also, I know the code in the link is awful; the point is doing a 1:1 comparison between the architectures.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/stephanGarland/f6b7a13585c0caf9eb64b...
And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.
But if you don’t want Apple, or you want to be able to upgrade, check out Frameworks. [1]
Really satisfying combination of quality and value for high performance laptops.
Apple is better because of actual superior technology. The chips are custom made and no one can match the technology yet.
Yes and: (as you know) Aggregate volume also benefits Apple's whole product suite.
It's hard for a laptop mfg to justify pushing to next node process for just ~25m units. So competitors have to wait for Qualcomm, Samsung, whomever to transition.
It's easier for Apple with ~250m phones, ~50m tablets, ~25m laptops, etc. per year. (Apple's war chest also enables monosopoly of upcoming node processes.)
Imagine trying to pull off AirPods or Vision without that deep vertical integration. The ridiculously ambitious Vision is just barely feasible, riding on mobile's coattails. A Vision using 3rd party CPUs would be delayed.
--
This all is in addition to the Apple specific optimizations, which you mention.
I'll bow out here because I can just tell this won't be a worthwhile thread.
Back when Apple used Intel processors, they were at the mercy of Intel's roadmap; if Intel missed a deadline for a new chip, Apple had to change plans. Obviously, that's no longer the case.
Back in the Motorola/IBM days, their G5 processor ran so hot that Apple had to create a special case with 7 fans to cool it. It was an amazing engineering feat, but something Apple would never do unless they had no choice. I've used a Power Mac G5—it sounded like a jet taking off, and the fans stayed on. [2]
They get to integrate new technologies quicker than being constrained by the industry.
Apple launched the first 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5s, in 2013—at least a year before any Android manufacturer could. And when Qualcomm finally shipped a 64-bit processor, no version of Android supported it. [1]
There are dozens of examples where Apple's vertical integration has allowed them to stay a step ahead of competitors.
The latest is the C1 modem that shipped in the iPhone 16e. Because the C1 is much more efficient than Qualcomm's modem, the 16e gets better battery life than the more expensive iPhone 16 with Qualcomm's modem. [3]
And because Qualcomm's licensing fees are a percentage of the cost of the device it's in, shipping the C1 enables them to put modems in laptops. The Qualcomm fee is significant: an iPad Air starts at $599; the same iPad Air model with one of Qualcomm's modems costs $749.
Customers have wanted MacBooks with cellular modems forever; now they'll be able to do that, since the modem will become part of Apple's SoC in the near future.
That's what you can do when you're not constrained by off-the-shelf components.
[1]: "First 64-bit Android phone has no 64-bit software"—https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/first-64-bit-android...
[2]: https://thehouseofmoth.com/a-little-known-fact-about-the-pow...
[3]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/27/apples-c1-modem-b...
- The integrated on-chip RAM dramatically speeds up memory access. Your full 16 GB of RAM on an M1 functions at cache speeds; meanwhile, the L3 cache on an Intel processor is 1-8M, more than 3 orders of magnitude smaller.
- Apple takes full advantage of this with their software stack. Objective C and Swift use reference counting. The advantage of refcounting is that it doesn't have slow GC pauses, but the disadvantage is that it has terrible locality properties (requiring that you update refcounts on all sorts of different cache lines when you assign a variable) which often make it significantly slower on real-world Intel hardware. But if your entire RAM operates at cache speeds, this disadvantage goes away.
- Refcounting is usually significantly more memory-efficient than GC, because with the latter you need to set aside empty space to copy objects into, and as that space fills up your GC becomes significantly less efficient. This lets Apple apps get more out of smaller overall RAM sizes. The 16GB on an M1 would feel very constraining on most modern Wintel computers, but it's plenty for Apple software.
- The OS is aware of the overall system load, and can use it to determine whether to use the performance or efficiency cores, and to allocate workloads across cores. The efficiency cores are very battery-efficient; that's why Macbooks often have multiple times the battery life of Windows laptops.
- The stock apps are all designed to take advantage of efficiencies in the OS and not do work that they don't need to, which again makes them faster and more battery efficient.
I don't see the current US leadership wanting to put that in jeopardy.
We get what we pay for.
Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.
My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.
Incredible value.
Ah! my early 2015 13" Macbook pro died only few weeks back. I don't think any other laptop will last nearly 10 years (TBF I did replace the battery and speakers for $280 in 2020 though)
and a pleasure to work with
I am sad that the resale value didn't hold as much as people claim Apple products do, but that’s because of the overpriced storage mostly
Looks like I can get $2500 vs the $7600 I paid for it
So rolling over into a newer maxed out model isnt so easily rationalized
I’d be tempted to buy a used machine with more RAM because I’ve had really good experiences with used electronics like laptops or phones.
BTW I have Apple Intelligence turned off but I’m not prepared to say it won’t ever be useful for anybody.
I don't think that expecting everyone to waste 3x the money to scratch the same itch is an informed take, specially when the $300 shovelware has far better specs in terms of RAM and by far HD.
Nowadays you can even get better performing miniPCs for half the price than your MacBook Air M3, such as any of the systems packing a AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS.
I think some people look at the shiny computers and don't look past that.
This is a stupid comparison: even a Mac mini pretty much fulfills this, since the M4 is a step up from the M3 and the actively-cooled mini can sustain higher performance than the passively-cooled MacBook Air, and at about half the price of an M3 MacBook Air.
What do you think it is then?
It isn't, and it's amusing how people get riled with a simple request to justify why dismissed someone else's opinion without presenting a single argument.
> I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products.
They are consumer electronics, and laptop manufacturers are a dime a dozen. Why do you believe they are special in that regard? I mean, until recently they even shipped with a below-standard amount of RAM.
> There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.
That's the definition of a Veblen good, something that is not known for being useful beyond serving as a status symbol.
I don't think you understood the Veblen good definition. And MacBooks do not fit the definition. The parent comment explained it well.
I love it though and I believe there is no better alternative. Everything else is just the shit without the nice package.
That's orthogonal to the concept of a Veblen good. A Veblen good can very much be shit wrapped in cellophane.
The core trait of a Veblen good is that customers buy it as a status symbol. Also, being overpriced contributes to reduce the number of those who can afford to buy one.
One could easily put together a significantly more powerful Linux desktop for a lower price. This has always been the case, but Apple's marketing tries to convince you otherwise. Honestly, I've always been surprised by how effectively their marketing has misled the tech-savvy crowd on HN.