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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> but I mean, 20% is not that much for 99% of the population.

As long as you're ok being tethered to the wall, and even then, guzzling power.

The whole point of Apple Silicon is that its performance is exactly the same on battery as tethered to the wall AND it delivers that performance with unmatched power efficiency.

Its the same on pure desktop. Look at the performance per watt of the Mac Mini. Its just nuts how power efficient it is. Most people's monitors will use more power than the Mac Mini.

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My “fancy” Windows work laptop has 45 minutes of battery life, while my M3 MacBook Pro will go 14 hours compiling C++ or running JavaScript and Docker images, and do so twice as fast as my work laptop could. I’d say you get what you pay for, but my work laptop was around the same price as my M3.

I wouldn’t be opposed to going back to Linux. But once you stop looking for power sockets all the time and start treating your laptop like a device you can just use all day at any moment, it’s hard to go back.

That's because your company's security department has virus scanners scanning every bit of code (including 99% of the virus scanner itself).

My company literally has four different apps “protecting” me now, including two different malware scanners. Neovim runs like it’s a 286. That said, before they’d installed everything it still wasn’t any faster than my Mac.

I was just looking at an HP laptop with a snapdragon X processor that claimed 34 hours of battery life while watching video.

It'd be tempting if I had any idea what the software compatibility story would be like. For example, the company I'm contracting with now requires a device monitor for SOC2 compliance (ensuring OS patches are applied and hard drive encryption remains on). They don't even want to do it, but their customers won't work with them without it.

Surprise surprise, a quick check of the device monitor company's website shows they don't support ARM architecture devices at all.

It may still work. The prism emulation is pretty good, almost on par with Rosetta2.

I have the surface laptop 7 with the X elite in it. The only thing I've ran into that outright didn't run was MSSQL server.

It's not my main machine, that is still an M4 Macbook pro but I hop on it occasionally to keep up with what Windows is doing or if I need to help someone with something windows specific. I've got WSL2, Docker, VSCode, etc. all running just fine.

It's decent, but not amazing. Feels a little slower than my M2 Air I have but not much, most of that is probably just windows being windows.

Would be nice to be able to get Linux running on one of these

Sadly, I'm doing dotnet work, including a legacy webforms codebase. Not running mssql server directly, but lots of other tools- visual studio, sql server profiler, sql server management studio, that sort of thing. EVEN IF all of that worked, I have already verified from the company that supplies the device management software that they don't support non-x86 architectures.

Bummer. They are neat little laptops, and with the X elite 2 (assuming they end up in some windows laptops and aren't exclusively for the new android chromebooks) it's about the closest we'll get to a MacBook on Windows for now.

I wish Microsoft put more pressure on vendors to support ARM.

The last Snapdragon X Elite claims really didn't pan out though.

Which left me bitter quite honestly as I was looking forward to them a lot.

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