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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Did Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple?

He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU.

He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster.

  Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.

I can't believe this crap is getting upvoted. Hopefully this guy loses all his credibility going forward. This kind of post is seriously misleading and smells like like an undisclosed sponsor review.

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No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships

Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture.

The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.

This is your actual headline:

  "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously."

You're basing the headline on a single FP64 test for a $600 laptop. Come on man.

If your headline was being honest, it'd say "Apple A18 Pro is still 3-4x more efficient and significantly faster than Intel's low end chip in common tasks".

If this isn't an undisclosed sponsored review, then it's just misleading clickbait for Youtube views. It's clearly working for you.

You can do better.

I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it.

For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.

Just because this title did the best doesn't make it not misleading. If you are a serious reviewer, it wouldn't have been an option in the first place.

You can make an even more outlandish title and get even more views. Doesn't make it right.

since it's too much to paste in here, here's 10 recent tech review videos from each of the top 10 most viewed tech youtubers:

https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf

Here's a few of them:

- Humane AI Pin Review: The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed

- I Tested the World's Craziest Smartphone

- Do NOT Buy These Fake Tech Products!

- This Is Not a Normal Laptop...

- Unboxing the $10,000 Mystery Tech Box

- Don't Make This PC Building Mistake

- This Desk Accessory Changes Everything

- I Didn't Expect This Phone to Be This Good

- I Bought a Mystery Tech Box from Amazon

- Testing the Craziest Cheap Tech on Temu

Jeff Geerling's videos have fine titles.

Declaring that Jeff can't be a serious reviewer because he uses clickbait is kinda silly. Have you seen the state of journalism? Somehow the tabloids are frequently less clickbaity.

It also seems that YouTube is steering the ship: they could simply push content that’s straightforward and non-clickbait (and in fact: downgrade clickbait), but as Geoff says the clickbait got 2x the traffic.

That’s not “the same amount of people were shown the video and 2x the people clicked in”. The algo is always skewing.

Sounds like you’re trying to justify kicking dogs because everyone in the industry goes around kicking dogs. Say it ain’t so.

Just because lots of people are doing something that sucks does not make it OK.

It's a hook. That's been a standard part of writing for like at least a hundred years.

It's not kicking dogs. Or, if it is kicking dogs, society has been doing it for at least as long as publishable media has been a thing, probably longer with the likes of bards.

This is ridiculous

I’m a writer, I write for a few magazines and have published three books. I write hooks all the time.

A good hook does not have to be clickbait.

In my experience, when a person struggles to come up with a good hook, they write clickbait.

You are trying to launder responsibility for a clickbait title to a computer program. Then you try to shift the topic to the public good you are providing.

I don’t think it’s wrong to use clickbait, but come on, own up to it. You consciously chose to “let [YouTube] pick it.”

I never said it wasn't clickbait.

If you don't like it, either install DeArrow or subscribe to my blog, where I tone it down for the more technical audience. (Or block/ignore my content, no skin off my back!)

That's why you're not a serious reviewer. If you're serious, you wouldn't mislead people.

Even your blog post does not tell the truth nor does it have highlights of benchmarks that represent how people will actually use a $600 laptop.

The people who are buying these laptops are likely not very technical and it's your job to guide them. They wouldn't know that an FP64 test on the $600 laptop is near useless - yet you base the entire conclusion on it.

Jeff has a day job. He is not a professional reviewer. He shows cool products and showcases what he’s passionate about. YouTube as a medium requires clickbait - that’s the belly of the beast.

I'm not denying that clickbait works on Youtube. He's amassed 1 million Youtube subscribers doing clickbait it seems.

My problem is that both the clickbait title and the conclusion are straight up wrong and misleading.

Even clickbait titles on Youtube will often have the correct conclusion. This is not the case here.

Jeff, you may want to think about your credibility going forward. Please avoid becoming one of the "influencers" who collect pennies via clicks.

You have an opportunity to be continue to be taken seriously like you have been so far.

Surely there must be some way to avoid mis-leading clickbait titles.

Separately, asking your fellow community-members to not bother, and that too with an unaffected shrug, just kills the conversation we would want to have with you.

Overall you can always say - if you don't like it then ignore my content.

Then... people doing scam or misinformation can also say that

- ignore it.

No. We like your content.

While you may get more clicks etc at the moment - eventually you will lose subscribers.

You could have made the title at least like

- Intel tries hard to win against apple silicon - Almost there but not yet...

I think the lite tip of: “take your credibility seriously” stands, however you are getting attacked by pretty much one (ab-)user. (Those type of users are normally not even in your market.)

I think it’s pretty normal that you are incentivized by YT. Too bad the internet favors screaming and yelling. Pretty clear line you draw between writing and video.

No, I disagree with you here - it isn't one user and certainly not an abuser. This is reputationally damaging, and doubling down is not helping. Arguably, the doubling down is the most damaging part.

An absence of open expression of disapproval is not the same as approval - people may just be avoiding dogpiling a member of our community.

I would add that people have a right to express disagreement or disappointment in a respectful manner in accordance with the rules of this moderated private space, and we have not had moderation/interventions suggesting otherwise. The criticisms are reasonable, to my mind at least, and probably ought to be taken as a massive hint that something is wrong. We are less than a day in, and it's not too late to fix things.

I am trying not to be too critical, as I have enjoyed previous content from this channel and I wish the poster well for the future.

I’ll just go and pick out those sentences I find not of curious good will for this forum:

“Did Jeff […] get paid to post misleading headlines”

“I can't believe this crap is getting upvoted. Hopefully this guy loses all his credibility going forward. This kind of post is seriously misleading and smells like like an undisclosed sponsor review.”

Ad hominem, cursing, opinion as fact with a barrage of replies.

That could have gone three steps up in politeness without losing any of the criticism.

Yep, there is just one account going ballistic in this HN thread, Jeff would be well within his right to ignore that kind of ragebait.

All of us have watched enough Jeff Geerling videos to know that he's not a secret spy for Intel or the Manchurian Candidate for Apple haters. He just wants to try out new technology with the curiosity that most people have, and apparently that's enough to outrage some people. Accusing him of avoiding disclosure is against HN's guidelines and generally an absentminded accusation to level. Methinks somebody doth protest too much...

It sounds like you agree with the criticism that your title is a bunch of baloney, but somehow think that's not your fault? You wrote the lies in that title, not an algorithm.

> I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it.

I think you’re being mid leading here Jeff. You almost make it sound like YT actually came up with the title.

For anyone that is not a YouTuber, Jeff wrote three different titles himself, then YouTube ran an A/B test and just kept the one that resulted in the most watch time.

Jeff consciously chose to write a click bait title, he could equally have chosen not to.

He also consciously chose to post it on Youtube, he could have chosen not to.

You mentioned in your you were interested in seeing the 18A replacement for the N100 series.

My understanding is the Wildcat lake 304 is that replacement, and it's been "released" for a while. It can be configured down to 10W vs 6W for the N100. Both draw about 7W from the wall when idle. The 304 is about 80% faster for the same power draw, has a better GPU in includes a 15 TOPS NPU.

Despite the 304 being released, it's not easily available yet.

Fingers crossed some of the usual mini PC suspects pick it up as it rolls out. Though I think 4 or 8 GB is back on the menu, annoyingly. Maybe it'll get some of the mini PC vendors to stop shipping Windows 11 by default!

Don't worry too much about it. For what it's worth, you made the sponsorship disclaimer abundantly clear up front and the comparison was fair.

I went through the whole thread of this conversion, and as the old adage goes, don't feed the trolls.

> this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks

> this was not sponsored in any way

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.

It's common for manufacturers to loan devices for review, without having any input in the content of the review. It is disclosed here in the video, which seems fine imo.

It was obviously loaned so he could do a review. That's not sponsorship.

You should _want_ that to happen, otherwise the only people who can do reviews will be the few who can afford to spend thousands for hardware they don't want or need.

You're completely right. Power draw scales non-linearly with clock frequency. Therefore one can easily increase perf/W by lowering the clock frequency, at the expense of performance. This is not new information, this is basic physics. The Apple M-chips were not revolutionary because of their efficiency, but because they were (and still are) efficient AND fast. In fact the fastest consumer chips on the market.

So agreed, this is extremely misleading.

> faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.

That Intel chip is competing against the A series in the Neo. To get to M you need to spend at least 50% more (and there are considerably better Intel chip in laptops at that price range as well)

Also benchmark performance hardly matters for people buying laptops like this. It just has to be fast enough and not lag when running a handful of apps and have decent battery life (which presumably is the case here)

  Also benchmark performance hardly matters for people buying laptops like this. It just has to be fast enough and not lag when running a handful of apps and have decent battery life (which presumably is the case here)

Even you're fooled.

The A18 Pro is 50% faster in ST and maintains the ST while being fanless. The Intel chip will throttle almost immediately. The difference in efficiency is 3-4x.

Getting performance per watt out of the smaller CPUs is actually more impressive because they can't amortize the non-CPU power draws in the system over as much performance. Increasing the performance while maintaining that performance per watt is then entirely straightforward because you just use more of the same cores.

Except Intel's Core 5 320 is almost certainly bigger than the A18 Pro CPU.

They both have 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores.

Yes, they both have the same and Intel cores are known to be bigger than AMD and Apple cores but poor in area/performance.

So I'm not sure what your original post about smaller cores is all about considering that the A18 Pro CPU is almost certainly smaller in actual die size.

It's not about die area at all. It's about the SSD and chipset and WiFi etc. each using power on top of what the CPU uses, and ending up as a much larger percentage of system power draw for a 15W CPU than for the same system with a 60W CPU that has around four times the multi-thread performance by having four times as many of the exact same cores.

You lost me.

Maybe you can articulate what you're arguing from the start?

Suppose you have a system that under some workload will draw 10W to run the chipset, WiFi, SSD and so on and another 15W to run the CPU, so that it's 25W in total. The 15W CPU has X number of cores and gets a score of 1000 on some benchmark. Performance per watt is 40 points per watt.

If you put 4X of the same cores in the same system then the CPU uses 60W, the WiFi etc. still use 10W, so the whole system uses 70W. It scores 4000 points and the performance per watt is 57 points per watt. You got four times the multi-thread performance and performance per watt went up.

That's why any CPU reviewer worth their salt will isolate CPU power.

Which reviewer does that? How do you isolate CPU power? Measuring the pins? Software reporting is half bullshit. Also nobody even reports idle power. Don't tell me idle is hard to define bla bla we all know what's idle. Even an inaccurate figure is better than no figure. And there are community compiled lists that are very helpful when building systems.

So where is the reviewer worth their salt you're talking about?

Notebookcheck always isolates CPU power by measuring idle and draw from the wall.

Many top quality CPU reviewers also do this. Chinese reviewer Geekerwan is probably the best at it. In the past, written reviews like Anandtech will always do it. Today, anyone with video editing software thinks they can review CPU performance.

Ever since Youtube, there have been plenty of low quality reviewers that mislead people. I didn’t know who this Jeff guy was but now he’s on my list as one. There are still some who do proper reviews.

> Notebookcheck always isolates CPU power by measuring idle and draw from the wall.

That's not actually isolating CPU power. To begin with, the CPU itself has idle power draw. Measuring that way would favor a CPU that has worse power management because it would be excluding the draw the CPU itself fails to shed at idle.

It also gets it wrong the other way. The SSD etc. is using however much at idle but that isn't the amount it uses when running the benchmark. Many of them don't have very fine grained power management and will draw ~100mW at idle but consume close to full power under even moderate load.

You can never fully isolate CPU power. Even software reading of CPU power is not always accurate.

The most accurate is reading from the wall. Thats what Notebookcheck does.

For all intents and purposes, it is good enough to get a read on CPU efficiency. Furthermore, if you are comparing equivalent systems, it is good enough to compare the two.

> You can never fully isolate CPU power. Even software reading of CPU power is not always accurate.

And what results from this when you compare system with a 15W CPU to one with a 60W CPU on performance per watt when both systems have an additional 10W draw from non-CPU components?

Once again, you lost my in what you're actually trying to argue.

All we care about here is performance for the CPU, performance per watt, and performance per die area.

> This is like saying my Intel Pentium 3 matches Apple M5 in perf/watt

... if it was within orders of magnitude of being true, perhaps.

If the result isn't what you want it to be ... it's undisclosed sponsor review.

If it's utter Apple shill bullcrap like Geekbench, caught 100x rewriting results in favor of Apple (for what rea$on it'$ not hard to figure out), it's perfectly OK because it supports what you believe in.

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