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Comment by chasing0entropy | Hacker News Reader

Spam marketing. Starting at $900 for 256gb hdd 16gb of ram and an M4 is nowhere near the midrange windows laptop price. A Lenovo E16 with a Ryzen 7, 64gb ram and 2tb SSD is $900 right now.

Toss that with the seemingly OBVIOUS throttling due to non-existent forced air cooling that nearly every fanboy bench tester has given a pass for. 15 years ago NO ONE would have tolerated a 40% performance drop after heatsoaking.

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Had m1/m2/m4 air and don't think i've experienced throttling. They rarely heat up, and oftentimes i do heavy cpu load with large c++ compile jobs.

What workloads are you envisioning where this is a problem and if throttling kicks in does it make ui/os laggy, or just reduce throughput (the former being noticeable where the latter is just mean longer wait of say a rendering job or something). I'm guessing maybe gaming is the issue, but i don't think anyone really buys a mac to game.

I searched for the Lenovo E16 and can only find a $900 version at a 3rd party seller on Amazon. With the same memory but twice the hard disk as the Apple.

Much more noticeably, however is the Intel Core Ultra 5 225U which is about half the performance as an M4.

However, the $900 MacBook is not the one with the large screen, right? That costs much more money, right? It doesn’t make sense to compare a small laptop with a large laptop. Even if they are in the same price range, consumers aren’t really choosing between the two.

Even on the pro models with fans, they only turn on under heavy load. Most regular work is not heavy load, especially not the kind of work the Air is designed for. So I as a developer consider the fanless design to be a feature, not a performance problem. I've got an x86 desktop (and cloud services) for heavy workloads.

I don't know what I would do with that much SSD, and it makes me wonder if they're using cheap stuff or if it's all on one PCI lane.

The RAM size is barely an issue because the OS has had excellent efficiency from coming from phone engineering. I've had 16 gig for years and never had a problem.

Very obviously assembled from cheap components at that price range. I like Lenovo Business stuff. Their regular laptops are assembled from the same cheapo components as the HP and Dell laptops my parents brag about getting for a steal at Costco… which then fail irreparably in under 2 years. Rinse repeat.

> wonder if they're using cheap stuff or if it's all on one PCI lane

Nah they just aren't charging apple tax. "Bad" ssd (which imo are still amazing) are dirt cheap these days.

for me 16gig is definitely not enough.

I'm on a 36gb M3 and I have to reboot it every three to five days to have it behave again.

I have normal dev apps open: a browser with jira, another with testing, another with documentation, an ide, teams, calendar, zoom.. it adds up very, very quickly. 16gigs are gone in the blink of an eye

If you have to reboot to get it useable again instead of just killing and re-launching the applications there's something wrong with the OS, not with the applications. Have you tried killing and re-launching the browsers and pseudo-browsers (Teams etc.)?

The Lenovo is more like $1,200. Plus, even with lower specs Apple laptops perform better, are more pleasant to use, and last longer.

I've a lot of experience with owning both Windows and Apple laptops for a long time.

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