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Comment by Barathkanna | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.

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I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.

This. My M1 MacBook felt like a similarly shocking upgrade -- probably not quite as much as my first SSD did, but still the only other time when I've thought, "holy sh*t, this is a whole different thing".

The M1 was great. But the jump felt particularly great because Intel Macbooks had fallen behind in performance per dollar. Great build quality, great trackpad, but if you were after performance they were not exactly the best thing to get

For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.

After the M1, my casual home laptop started outperforming my top-spec work laptops.

> For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.

But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.

It's a lot more believable if you tried some of the other Wintel machines at the time. Those Macbook chassis were the hottest of the bunch, it's no surprise the Macbook Pro was among the first to be redesigned.

I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs).

It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans, random brief freezes of the whole system, a shell that still feels like a toy, a proprietary 170W power supply and mediocre battery life, subpar display. The keyboard is okay, at least. What a joke.

Meanwhile, my personal M3 Max system can render Da Vinci timelines with complex Fusion compositions in real time and handle whole stacks of VSTs in a DAW. Compared to the Lenovo choking on an IDE.

There will be not so big difference if you compare laptops in the same price brackets. Cheap PCs are crap.

> Cheap PCs are crap.

Expensive PCs are also crap. My work offers Macbooks or Windows laptops (currently, Dell, but formerly Lenovo and/or HP), and these machines are all decidedly not 'cheap' PCs. Often retailing in excess of $2k.

All my coworkers who own Windows laptops do is bellyache about random issues, poor battery life, and sluggish performance.

I used to have a Windows PC for work about 3 years ago as well, and it was also a piece of crap. Battery would decide to 'die' at 50% capacity. After replacement, 90 minute battery life off charger. Fan would decide to run constantly if you did anything even moderately intensive such as a Zoom meeting.

A lot of this is just windows sucking major balls. Linux distros with even the heaviest DEs like KDE absolutely fly on mediocre or even low range hardware.

I got a lunar lake laptop and slapped fedora on it and everything is instant. And I hooked up 2 1400p/240hz over thunderbolt.

I've had this with gen5 PCIe SSDs recently. My T710 is so fast it's hard to believe. But you need to have a lot of data to make it worth.

Example:

    > time du -sh .
    737G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   24.63 secs

And on my laptop that has a gen3, lower spec NVMe:

    > time du -sh .
    304G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   80.86 secs

It's almost 10 times faster. The CPU must have something to do with it too but they're both Ryzen 9.

To me that reads 3x, not "almost 10x". The main differrence here is probably power. A desktop/server is happy to send 15W to the SSD and hundreds of watts to the CPU, while a laptop wants the SSD running in the ~1 watt range and the CPU in the 10s of watts range.

There's over twice as much content in the first test. It's around 3.8gb/s vs 30gb/s if you divide both folder size and both du durations. That makes it 7.9 times faster and I'm comfortable calling this "almost 10 times".

oops. I missed the size diff. that's a solid 8x. that's cool!

The total size isn't what matters in this case but rather the total number of files/directories that need to be traversed (and their file sizes summed).

I responded here, it's essentially the same content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150030

I believe you, but your benchmark is not very useful. I get this on two 5400rpm 3T HDDs in a mirror:

    $ time du -sh .
    935G    .
                                                                                                                          
    real    0m1.154s

Simply because there's less than 20 directories and the files are large.

I should have been more clear: It's my http cache for my crawling jobs. Lots of files in many shapes.

My new setup: gen5 ssd in desktop:

    > time find . -type f | wc -l
    5645741
    ________________________
    Executed in    4.77 secs

My old setup, gen3 ssd in laptop:

    > time find . -type f | wc -l
    2944648
    ________________________
    Executed in   27.53 secs

Both are running pretty much non-stop, very slowly.

This and high resolution displays, for me at least.

I thought so too on my mini PC. Then I got myself my current Mac mini M4 and I have to give it to Apple, or maybe in part to ARM... It was like another SSD moment. It's still not spun up the fan and run literally lukewarm at most my office, coding and photo work.

The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.

"Core" was/is like "PowerPC" or "Ryzen", just a name. Intel Core i9, for instance, as opposed to Intel Pentium D, both x86_x64, different chip features.

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