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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).

Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.

Now, if only Asahi was more complete.

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I am a longtime Windows user and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that the M4 I am forced to use for work runs the Rust compiler a good bit faster than the big fancy gaming PC I just got with a 9800X3D.

Rust literally compiles ~4x faster on WSL than on the Windows command line, on the same hardware, so try that and see. Also set up the mold or wild linker as well as sccache, although sccache is OS agnostic so you can use it on macOS too. Make sure your code is on the WSL side not on /mnt/c which is the Windows side though, that will kill compilation speed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/CsEy9bLivK

That has not been my experience at all; I get pretty much the same times on the same machine on Linux and Windows. Something weird has happening to that person. Someone mentioned Defender, and that could certainly be it, as I have it totally disabled (forcibly, by deleting the executable).

This is why I stopped using Windows.

You shouldn't have to go through all these extra steps just to squeeze out the same performance you would get by just installing [Other OS].

At some point I realized I was spending hours at a time trying to 'fix' Windows and decided to give Mac a try right around the time that Apple Silicon came out. It was a night and day difference.

Gaming, especially multiplayer

CrossOver lets me play most single player games just fine on my M4 Pro, and personally I found multiplayer gaming taking too much of my time and emotional energy anyway.

CrossOver is alright but not always enough in terms of performance for many games compared to a Windows machine, especially one with a dedicated GPU.

WSL is fantastic - apart from the fact that you need to clear it intermittently via disk compression. I use it for work and it's great until you get something incredibly frustrating, like needing a pass-through for your hardware.

The one thing I can say with my macbook as someone who's switched from a decade of windows, is that stuff tends to just work, minus window swithcing.

At least 10 years ago, some IBM tools I was forced to use worked faster in a linux VM on Windows (through VirtualBox) than on Windows.

WSL is the best way to avoid all the Windows slowness as far as the VFS and the forking overhead.

I'd wager that's more likely due to Windows than the hardware. Like sure the hardware does play a part in that but its not the whole story or even most of it.

My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.

Afaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night.

No, it’s not NTFS, it’s the file system filter architecture of the NT kernel.

I had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years.

Windows Defender is a file system filter which you cannot disable. You may have others (but they're fortunately rare, now).

All that said, you cannot disable the architecture, i.e. bypass the file system filter code.

You can with Dev Drives now apparently, which don't use NTFS and disable ALL the filter drivers (including the Defender one)

I stopped using Windows just as these were added so now I'm curious if there's any actual performance benefit to using the.

No, they don't disable the Windows Defender filter, they put it in async mode.

This guy gets it. Yes bingo. It's the VFS' filters/ACLs support afaik.

Just deleting 40,000 files from the node_modules of a modest Javascript project can thoroughly hammer NTFS.

I think part of that is Explorer, rather than NTFS. Try doing it from the console instead. rd /q /s <dir>.

It still takes a lot longer than Linux or Mac OS X.

NTFS is definitely slower to modify file system structures than ext4.

A big part of it is that NT has to check with the security manager service every time it does a file operation.

The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.

I don't know about ugly. Virtualization seems like a more elegant solution to the problem, as I see it. Though it also makes WSL pointless; I don't get why people use it instead of just using Hyper-V.

Honestly, just cause it's easier if you've never done any kind of container or virtual os stuff before. It comes out of the box with windows, it's like a 3 click install and it usually "just works". Most people just want to run Linux things and don't care too much about the rest of the process

Try adding your working directory to the exclusions for windows defender, or creating a Dev Drive instead in settings (will create a separate partition, or VHD using ReFS and exclude it from Windows defender). Should give it a bit of a boost.

Apple buries this info but the memory bandwidth on the M series is very high. Doubly and triply so for the Pro & Max variants which are insanely high.

Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.

They don't bury it. It's literally on the spec page these days. And LPCAMM2 falls somewhere between the base M and Pro CPUs while still being replaceable.

The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.

This shouldn't be surprising. macOS has a faster filesystem+VFS than Windows, and the single thread perf of the M4 beats most PC cpus. I'm not sure what linker rust uses, but the apple native ld64/ldPrime is also pretty fast as far as linkers go.

Windows is also slow enough at forking, that clang has "in-process CC1" mode because of it.

That's most likely because windows indexes and scans files rustc produces. My linux machines demolish my iMac in rust compilation.

Intel iMac?

M4. To be fair I bought it as a pretty ssh terminal in living room into compute in another room.

You’re running Windows unironically?

This is how opinions differ. IMO plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible, MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).

The metal is more "luxury", though.

> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot

This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon

I have an Air. Maybe active cooling prevents it from getting too hot. With the Air, the metal body is kind of the heatsink.

I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...

If the body was a heatsink, it would be extremely hot to the touch.

https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...

From your link:

Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink

Anyway, the author claims:

you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before.

Does toasty mean extremely hot?

The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle.

Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees?

You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could.

Everything’s a trade off.

In a Notebookcheck test, they got the bottom plate up to 43C, and top plate near the screen up to 45C: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-passively-cooled-M4-SoC-ma...

hence the Neo and the iPhone chip!

YOU GUYS IT HAS A HEADPHONE JACK

Don't all macbooks have one?

Makes me wonder if this is an ADA requirement for education devices. (assistive listening devices)

Not even ADA - kids all get headphones to listen to education materials. Wired headphones are way, way easier to manage.

It's almost as if they weren't lying when they said dropping it in the phone was a waterproofing measure. I guess people aren't dropping their laptops in pools all the time.

There’s also plenty of room for it which is why it continues to appear on all MacBooks.

This isn't news, all MacBooks have one.

> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).

My body is the heatsink

Also for males it is natural birth control. Can be a plus depending on your situation

I think the 14" and Air might get a little warmer, but I can't recall a time I've felt heat from my 16" M4 Pro, fan sound is rare. On my 13" Intel, it was comically easy to cook my balls and the fans were at max constantly

Plastic is better if done right. I do not know a single manufacturer today which does plastic right.

> plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible

Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.

I'd go further and suggest that metal is a lousy substance for laptop enclosures.

> ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop

Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.

I have so many questions.

- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?

- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

Shh... we don't talk about those dark ages any more. Times were different.

> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

The hard part of beating someone to death with a z16 is lifting and swinging a z16; if you can manage that, though...

> - Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.

(Hey, Eric!)

We test these things in production.

The best laptop that I ever had was an Thinkpad T530 back in ~2012 - that chunky brick felt like it was made from recycled soviet tanks.

Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.

Thinkpad build quality depends heavily on the model. The flagship T-series are still tough as nails, generally speaking

They built a reputation on that and silently replaced the plastic with crap abs. Thinkpads have been garbage since 2012. Not specs wise but build quality wise. Spec wise it’s always been a beefy machine.

> I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.

~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal

Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.

The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.

The same is also true within the Macbook line. The 14" Pro is smaller and nearly 2lbs lighter than the first 13" unibodies. I have my 2009 college laptop on a shelf as a memento and it feels pretty chunky. This hasn't changed much in the M-series though, and the M5 is slightly heavier than the M1.

Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.

My Sony Vaio Z from 2009 or 2010 looks at your Dell in contempt: 13.1" FullHD screen at 314mm x 210mm (we'll pretend the thickness does not matter ;)) and 1.36kg. Vaio TT was even smaller footprint.

But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.

What about something like [1].

1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/

One thing Apple seems to do very well compared to other vendors is make all their hardware available in all markets on release. Companies like Dell, Asus, Lenovo, they have a confusingly large array of models, and they never release the best ones worldwide, or it takes so long to get to New Zealand that I already gave up and bought an Apple computer instead.

I might be a dinosaur but I just can't stand laptops that have touch screen...

I, too, am a dinosaur, but touchscreens on removable screens/tablets are the way to go!

My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.

When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.

It's awesome!

You might want to actually click the links and spent a couple of minutes before typing comments. This is not a laptop with a touch screen - it's a tablet with a kickstand and detachable keyboard.

That's just a broken, compromised Windows laptop. A true "master of nothing" device. Windows is a miserable tablet OS and a tablet that uses a kickstand makes it a pain to use in desktop mode.

Windows is a miserable OS, period. But these devices are rather well supported by Linux.

I accidentally got a pair of ThinkPads that happened to have touch screens, and I absolutely love the touch screen, often it's easier than the touchpad or keyboard nub.

Maybe don't touch the screen eh ?

Touchscreens can be disabled in software.

What are your use-cases for 128gb of RAM? I find it hard to imagine what you could be doing with that, so it must be interesting :)

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:

- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.

- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.

- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.

Yeah, I have a 64GB M1 Max and can run local models pretty well. I bought it on release and even now it never feels slow. I may upgrade just because I want to move to the 14” since I travel more now.

Unreal + blender + ide.

Fusion + blender + slicers.

Virt machines / docker + dev env

iOS Android web development

16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro

Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex

My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use

My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.

My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping

I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.

You mean all of that running all the time is 70gb?

I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.

Each line gets me over 50gb.

I'm assuming your not doing much in those apps.

Fusion is not free cad and is a hog.

So is kicad.

The language server for many things I work on sits at 28gb per copy.. I work for twitch, our code base is not small for the website. Moving all engineers to min spec 48gb.

I'll do stuff all day prototyping data analysis approaches that will fill ram with a pandas cross join.

I put my4 into thermal shutdown 2x in the last month and hard locked it due to swap use 3 times in the last month. I keep records so I can talk with IT about or dev machine specs. Apparently you can't run 30 concurrent yarn builds on a 3gb codebase... Who knew.

This isn't a works on my box competition I'm glad your workloads are that small, you can be a lot more efficient than me. I'm also lucky I bought all this ram before it became absurdly expensive.

It doesn't negate that I'm constantly over 64gb and that I'm super happy I have 128+ on my machines.

most people who are into graphics processing e.g video-games, 3d for films/entertainment industry etc need these "PRO-workstation" machines, or doing fluid mechanics

if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient

Unclear for a laptop, but for a workstation 1tb+ is what you want for any sort data science stuff.

Yeah, good luck with that at current RAM prices though. DDR5 RDIMMs are going for $20/gb+ right now which means 1tb is $20k, and that's with fairly conservative pricing too.

I've been looking at building a high memory workstation recently but the RAM prices are just prohibitive. Best option atm for 1tb+ seems to be to go back a couple gen and buy DDR4, you can get 1tb at under $5/gb right now. But obviously you're giving up some performance in the process.

Yupp, even before the ram shortage we were paying $60-$80k for 1u racks with 768 to 1.5tb ram and 48-128cores

Running FatLTO on Chrome.

Did you check what Framework offers?

> (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.

>I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials

Maybe ROG Flow 13 ? It's more like hybrid laptop, and geared toward "gaming"(because it's usually the gamer market that demand high performance), but nothing prevents you to use it as business machine.

It's also top of the line asus laptop, so i expect decent build quality.

> decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

Thinkpads don't show off their build materials like Apple does. I've had several over the years, variously made of magnesium alloy and carbon fibre.

Screen bending is not a great metric of 'decent build'. My Thinkpads have suffered people stepping on them, being dropped etc, and I think the lid flexibility is partly why it has survived all this time - they often use carbon fibre on the back of the screen.

ASUS ROG G14 is as close as you're going to get on the x86 side of things or that new chonk of a surface with the Ryzen 395+ and 128gb of ram. both are like $2500+

I have the chonk. 10/10 would chonk again. I miss the 12" MacBook form factor for an email/web/dumb terminal machine, though. Would love something like that with great Linux support. Bonus points for cellular.

The HP Zbook G1A is what you wanted. It's Strix Halo with up to 128GB of unified RAM and built like a MBP.

You do have 13" options, though 14" is much wider. If I was going for 13" workstation, I'd go for Asus ProArt PX13 with Ryzen AI Max 395 (if I got that right, there might be a plus somewhere) and 128GiB of RAM. They've got ROG Flow X13 with older hardware or Z13 with same hw as above, but that's a tablet computer instead.

At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.

Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).

Which Thinkpad do you have? Lenovo have introduced some lines with the name but diminished quality.

For a someone looking to switch from a M-series MacBook to a Thinkpad, which one would you recommend? Preferably not of a diminished quality, so I can daily-drive Ubuntu without missing Apple.

P1 comes to mind

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