Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking. I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that still works well. But recent releases... no better than the competition really.
Which competitor has a touchpad that’s equal to or better than apple?
I prefer the touchpad on my Surface Book 2 to the one on my Macbook Pro (2019). The one on my Macbook is comically huge, and I also am not in love with the feel/click noise compared to the Surface Book. YMMV.
Yeah the marketing effort is immense, and it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even on HN. Like the good old Apple hype days. Now to be fair, the M1 is an impressive iteration on the A* chip line. But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field.
Which Ryzen laptop currently competes with the latest macbooks in terms of form factor, performance, battery life and build quality? I'm honestly asking, I've been thinking about getting a Linux laptop in a while and I would be curious to see what the playing field is like
Form factor and build quality are not something AMD can control by making a better CPU architecture.
> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.
Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs. The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that. You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
Except you go to the store and there's laptops with 3 generations of cpus in there and the 10nm/14nm split for tenth gen so it's entirely possible to run into a laptop with an i7 worse than the i5 in the laptop next to it on the shelf/store webpage.
I just went from a 32GB RAM Macbook Pro to an 8GB RAM M1 Macbook Air...the difference is insane, I don't know what the hell the MB Pro is doing with its RAM, but it just felt like RAM was never enough on Intel Macbooks. Here on the M1, I don't feel my system crawling to a halt like I did on the MB Pro, and I'm doing the same workloads.
I've just made a similar switch I went from a Pro (2018 i9 Pro with 32GiB of RAM) to an M1 Air with 16GiB of RAM and its ridiculous. I've tried to look up what this difference might be, but all I've found is a hand-wavey answer about it being an SOC. If someone can ELI5 then I'd be super appreciative.
My feeling is that as everything is on chip, things are physically closer - less lanes on the motherboard - so latency from tasks is lessened. I would not have guessed it would be such a difference though.
Which Ryzen laptop currently competes with the latest macbooks in terms of form factor, performance, battery life and build quality? I'm honestly asking, I've been thinking about getting a Linux laptop in a while and I would be curious to see what the playing field is like
Form factor and build quality are not something AMD can control by making a better CPU architecture.
Not entirely for sure, but form factor is limited by thermal requirements (well, mostly, Apple and other OEMs have gotten into trouble by ignoring this in the past, like the first i9 macs), and that is influenced by cpu architecture.
> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.
Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs. The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that. You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
Maybe not.
But if you're thinking "Should I upgrade my 6 year old i7 system?" or "Will I notice the difference from spending an extra $200 on my CPU?" these days it isn't easy to come up with a sure answer.
Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs. The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that. You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
The decision that people think about most is when to upgrade (by definition it stretches over a longer time period than the single point purchasing decision). That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for Samsung etc. If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not helpful.
Yes, this point is so obvious, I feel like I've got to be missing something. I am a professional programmer. I am vaguely aware that Intel chips have X-Lake based codenames. I have no idea how to compare the chip in my current laptop to a new laptop based on Intel's marketing names. To convince myself to upgrade, I just go to Geekbench, because nothing else in the marketing tells me the new chip is better. Seems like a very fundamental marketing failure that could be resolved by exposing the X-Lake names to the public in some friendly form.
From what I understood, ARC operations are cheaper on M1 because of weaker memory ordering constraints. But I thought this was and ARM thing, not M1 specific, but I could be wrong
That's right. M1 doesn't have specific Objective-C optimizations.
An interesting realization that it could, though.
Overwhelming majority of MacOS/iOS software is written on Obj C and Swift, which have the same underlying semantics.
That said ARC doesn't have such a great impact on performance as some people (esp. fans of Java's GC etc.) would convince you. Most ++/-- operations on the refcount are eliminated by the compiler.
Death of moore’s law? Hmm. Meanwhile I just got a R9 5950X and it is drastically faster than my 5 year old i7. There must be some doubling of transistors in there, right? Also maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of a new generation of ARM CPUs wasn’t the wisest choice. Or maybe it is, idk.
Mores Law as originally stated said transistor density doubled every 18-24 months. Using larger CPU’s for example let’s you have more transistors, but has nothing to do with Mores Law. Clearly density has kept increasing, but the law refers to a rate of increase that we haven’t been able to meet. The original 386 released in 1985 had 275,000 transistors, using the slowest interpretation we would need to be at (2^18)…
Did Mores Law take into account 3D density or was it just single layer compactness?