Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

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This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever.

My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.

I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.

My work MBP also can drain the battery in a couple hours of light use. But that's because of FireEye / Microsoft Defender. FireEye has a bug where it pegs the CPU at 100% indefinitely and needs to be killed to stop its infinite loop. Defender hates when a git checkout changes 30,000 files and uses up all my battery (but I can't monitor this because I can't view the processes).

It’s always the corporate wares that caused the issues, in my case it’s crowdstrike and zscaler. Even with these wares I can last a full day with my M1 pro, I only notice the battery was drained to 0 once when I went to vacation for a week, it’s never happened before these wares

I also have to run Defender on my MacBook at work.

If you have access to the Defender settings, I found it to be much better after setting an exclusion for the folder that you clone your git repositories to. You can also set exclusions for the git binary and your IDE.

I have friendly management. I might ask them to exclude my folder full of git repos. Thank you. (No access on my end)

I didn’t even know Microsoft Defender was a thing on MBPs.

Have you checked whether the work laptop's bad battery life is due to the OS, or due to the mountain of crapware security and monitoring stuff that many corporations put on all their computers?

I currently have a M3 Pro for a work laptop. The performance is fine, but the battery life is not particularly impressive. It often hits low battery after just 2-3 hours without me doing anything particularly CPU-intensive, and sometimes drains the battery from full to flat while sitting closed in a backpack overnight. I'm pretty sure this is due to the corporate crapware, not any issues with Apple's OS, though it's difficult to prove.

I've tended to think lately that all of the OSes are basically fine when set up reasonably well, but can be brought to their knees by a sufficient amount of low-quality corporate crapware.

Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.

That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...

> Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage.

Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no other OS can manage today.

Battery life is poor though.

Hmm, for most desktop stuff, you're still limited to random access, where even if leagues above HDD, the NVMe still suck compared to sequential. It's sad that intel killed Optane/3D X-point, because those are mych better at random workloads and they had still lower latencies than the latest NVMe (not by much anymore).

I don't understand why Optane hasn't been revived already for modern AI datacenter workloads. Being able to augment and largely replace system RAM across the board with something cheaper (though not as cheap as NAND, and more power-hungry too) ought to be a huge plus, even if the technology isn't suitable for replacing HBM or VRAM due to bulk/power constraints.

It’s also tremendously durable, NAND doesn’t get close in write endurance.

Thing is, with Apple, even the bottom of the barrel entry devices (aka MBAs) get the high performance storage.

With Windows, you're probably still getting SATA and not even NVMe.

Windows laptops have been pretty much exclusively NVMe for years. The 2.5" SATA form factor was a waste of space that laptop OEMs were very happy to be rid of, first with mSATA then with M.2 using SATA or NVMe. NVMe finished displacing SATA years ago, when the widespread availability of hardware supporting the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature meant that entry-level NVMe SSDs could be both faster and cheaper than the good SATA SSDs. Most of the major SSD vendors discontinued their M.2 SATA SSDs long ago, indicating that demand for that product segment had collapsed.

Yeah I can tell this guy has not bought a SATA drive in a while.

The options in that space are increasingly dwindling which is a problem when supporting older machines.

Sometimes it is cheaper to get a sketchy m2 ssd and adapter than to get an actual sata drive from one of the larger manufactures.

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