511–520 of 942 posts
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Pretty sure that Apple considers this a feature.
Funny. Except there are fully supported MacBooks from 2013 running the latest version of macOS, still on their first battery, still bringing people joy and productivity.
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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?
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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.
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if you are not using an apple phone, your smartphone likely uses an ARM-licensed chip, and chromebooks/windows RT devices ran ARM cores the only thing holding back wider adoption is legacy x86 software
Gaming is still x86 territory and that includes 2 of the 3 main competing gaming consoles isn't? Hard to think of a PS5 as legacy stuff.
I think the xbox-s/x and ps5's choice of CPU vendor was driven more by business factors and the integrated graphics, than the virtues of x86 per se. The Switch does pretty well despite the less powerful CPU in the tegra.
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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.
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Web Developer here. Wouldn't accept anything less than 32GB for a work machine.
But have you benchmarked your workflow on x86+32GB vs M1+8GB?
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> 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.
That was me trying to play games on laptops with 'i7' about a dozen years ago.
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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.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. A 5nm version of the AMD stuff should be reasonably close to the M1. The main bottleneck is the production capacity, we badly need more manufacturers of high end chipsets.
I can answer why _I_ downvoted the comment. It was this part:
> [...] 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.
You can make a point without implying that anybody who doesn't agree with you is incompetent (the "Apple hype" meme is really stale).
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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…
Intel CPU numbering: iX-YYZZZ[Suffix] X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing. Suf…
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> The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. I know most people misunderstand Moore's law, but this is HN, so I expect better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor... Moore's law is quite alive and showing no signs of problems. > The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. Moore's Law is about number of transistors. Not about their…
> You don't need to, they're fast enough. You had me with everything except this. Any time someone claims the current state of computing hardware is "enough" I'm reminded of that fake 640K quote. There is no indication we are running out of applications for more compute power.
We're specifically running out of reasons to want faster linear (per core) general-purpose performance (in fact I'd say this happened some time ago). Everything else we get from here on in terms of smaller process etc. is just a bonus. We don't fundamentally need it to keep evolving our hardware for our ever-growing computation needs.
And that's because as our problems multiply and grow, parallel execution and heterogenous cores tend to solve our problems much more efficiently on the watt, than asking for "more of the same, but faster".
There's this Ford quote "if I had asked what people want, they'd have said faster horses". Fake or not, it reflects our tendency to stare at the wrong variables and miss the forest for the trees. The industry is full of languages utilizing parallel/heterogenous execution and you don't need a PhD to use one anymore.
CPUs are effectively turning into "controllers" that prepare command queues for various other types of processing units. As we keep evolving our GPU/ML/etc. processing units, CPUs will have less to do, not more. In fact, I expect CPUs will get simpler and slower as our bottlenecks move to the specialized vector units.