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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

The leap from intel to the M series chips really left everyone else behind. I can't even use my 2019 Macbook anymore it feels so sluggish.

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.

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I have the M3 Max, and a custom built pc using some Ryzen chip that has roughly equivalent benchmark scores to the M3 Max.

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”.

M series mac's are my dream c++ development machines. Just this week I was investigating some potential bugs in Qt's javascript engine and I was recompiling it from source across multiple tags to bisect. On my i9 mac I would compile Qt overnight, on my m3 pro it takes about 10 minutes, on battery, silently. Truly remarkable.

I have a M3 Max as well, 16" iteration, it's the best laptop I had, and it's clearly a desktop replacement for my usage and until I want to generate meme vids with LLM...

Nowadays I am looking forward to the Nvidia digits+ MacBook Pro duo.

I can easily take my M3 MBA on trips, using in on the plane both ways and a couple hours there for a few days, and not charge it once.

I honestly looked for alternatives when I bought it last summer but there weren’t any competitive options.

I mean my AMD T14 G4 gets like 12 hours of battery running windows, 150 browser tabs and a virtual environment. Not sure how the newer ones are and no they aren't as sleek or probably durable as a metal apple or dell XPS but I haven't got any complaints for the price.

Yeah everyone that went from "old shitty Intel" to M1 or above somehow gaslit themselves into believing nobody could catch up.

AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...

I don't think they "gaslit themselves," but I do think M1 was good enough a lot of people stopped thinking about hardware and their frame of reference is horribly out of date

Also it can’t be understated how bad Windows has gotten and what that trajectory looks like.

T14 Gen 5 AMD has replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and WWAN. Just got one for Linux (besides my MacBook) and loaded it up with 64GB RAM (which was only 160 Euro) and a 2TB SSD.

I had never really used a mac (or anything from apple) before M1, and since I got an M1 air I never looked back. Not all people who are hyped about apple silicon were previously apple users.

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.

The problem is that those AMDs still have to run something as awful as Windows 11

In the context of software development, I run Linux on those AMDs and it's a great experience. It's not for everyone and I respect that, but it's not too hard these days.

Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.

The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4.

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.

I had a 2023 ASUS Zephyrus G14 (AMD 6800 + 6900HD dGPU) and I took a battery hit, but not near what you saw. Somewhere closer to 20-25%.

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.

I have fedora on an all amd laptop and it’s wonderful

The problem with Apple is there is this awful MacOS along with the walled garden company called apple. The Problem with windows is.. none I can install my own.

Browser tab #89 is running at 120% CPU. Why are you running Daily Mail anyway

I have T14s Gen 3 AMD running Linux and I don't even come close to 12 hours, maybe half of that. That's my biggest complaint.

I never understand why people are so fixated on battery runtime. If you actually use the device indoors, don't you have a possibility to charge anytime. For me, I alternate between my home office room and the living room. Sometimes I work when on the train. And even less often in national flights and on airports. Except when flying or on very outdated trains, there never is an issue charging.

I like to use my devices without needing to be tethered to an outlet. I don't like having to deal with wires creating trip/pull hazards because my laptop needs charging. Sitting on the porch without needing to run extension cords is also nice.

I always connect to multiple external screens. I cannot imagine having only my laptop screen/keyboard.

I have a problem when the laptop doesn't survive 2 days on suspend... My previous T480 never had a problem, even on a 50% battery... but the newer T14 sometimes does.

You can thank windows modern suspend for that one

This is my biggest issue.

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.

Airplanes

100% this. My daily driver is a 2015 MacBook Pro that I only have one complaint about: the battery life doesn’t come anywhere close to letting me work on an airplane if there’s no 120V plugs available. I mean… most of the time I don’t mind just sleeping but it would be great to take better advantage of the quiet time with no slack messages.

Looks like they’re decent laptops. Although surprisingly the newest models are hundreds of dollars more than similarly spec’d MBAs. Not sure on how the CPU/GPU performance compares.

“When we saw that first system and then you sat there and played with it for a few hours and the battery didn’t move, we thought ‘Oh man, that’s a bug, the battery indicator is broken’”

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/09/m1-macbook-battery-life/

The upgrade to the M chips was shocking to me. My intel suddenly felt like it was defective.

Well, it was. Intel MacBooks had really crappy thermals, getting awfully hot and throttling at any hint of system load.

it always was. you people just gaslit yourselves into thinking it wasn't. intel macbooks were always pretty bad

You obviously have never used a PowerPC based Mac... Or else you would know that the inter macs were a massive leap forward.

The Intel chips got more sluggish with os updates being optimised for modern processors

I'm still using my M1 MacBook Pro. The thing hasn't slowed down at all. It's a great device.

Same for me. Workflow handles everything from web dev to Photoshop to Ableton - all working together - without hesitation

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