171–180 of 368 posts
It's not a fair comparison at all. This is comparing a thin/light laptop with a designed-for-purpose gaming laptop.
Here's an image showing the large heat exhaust vents.
https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/n...
This focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. My MacBook Air runs Jetbrains + a couple containers just fine for almost a couple of work days on battery. Is this i9 faster? Yes but at a 6 hour battery life and 2.9Kg of weight it might as well be a desktop (just save money and buy/build a better desktop or get a conso…
This is really Apple's own fault for talking up the performance of the M1 Pro/Max so much, but ultimately I don't think it will matter as long as they can keep pace with Intel and AMD. I expect I could count on one hand the number of people who were going to buy an M1 MBP but pivoted to one of these beasts after the 12-series benchmarks dropped.
From my perspective, I could not be more pleased that my (relatively) light and svelte 14" M1 Max, which can go all day and more on a single charge, is even in the same league performance-wise as creaking behemoths like this.
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That’s not true of the current Macs though. I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago. But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery. None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.
I'm not arguing for or against, but we've hit a fairly stable period of diminishing returns on specs. We've solved the storage latency and throughout bottlenecks, scheduling, and CPU core counts, so we don't really need beaucoups of RAM for a functional laptop. RAM bandwidth doubles with each generation and throughout and latency improve, so less is needed for the same performance. Batteries are relatively inexpensiv…
RAM bandwidth is improving a lot faster than its latency. (The latter is almost as stagnant as max CPU clock frequencies.)
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That’s not true of the current Macs though. I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago. But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery. None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.
Still using a Note 8. This phone is awesome. I forget how many years... I would be OK with my M1 Air performing in a similar way.
My iPhone came out around the same time and Apple is planning to support devices several generations older than mine with iOS 16...
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Can you really separate the “design” from how it’s manufactured?
Intel famously followed a "tik-tock" development cycle where they would move their existing designs to their next gen fabs, before updating the design. So yes, you absolutely can separate them, and that's how it was historically done. Though Intel fell behind on this philosophy.
If you don’t know how the space operates, why are you commenting?
Full disclosure, we're mostly a Windows shop so I'm very rarely using the Macbook for actual development (mostly just doing builds and running tests on it, otherwise just use it on a second monitor for browsing and Spotify :)).
Yes, it's subjective; I'm sure in some purely synthetic benchmark the Macbook wins, but in real life they're pretty close. And if I were actually lugging it around, I may prefer the lighter / quieter Macbook (but likely remote-ing into some Windows box or running Parallels would hurt perf enough to hate it).
I can also game on the Asus too :)
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Also, for every Android commentator talking about ARM, consider that Apple even named the company "Advanced RISC Machines," because they opposed having the name of a former competitor in there (because it was originally going to be "Acorn RISC Machine"). Apple also provided almost all the funding and initial leadership for the venture, while Acorn supplied most of the engineers and VLSI the silicon tooling.
It's touching that you reduce me to "Android commentator", but my point is that Apple has a lot of history to spite with their second-gen chips. Whether or not they're engineering their own cores or decided the name of ARM is irrelevant, they simply haven't proven that they can increase their desktop chip performance without packing more cores onto a die and calling it a day. If they manage to make significant single…
I think the point about Android commentators is that they may not have been following Apple’s silicon development closely enough to know this, especially if they think that the M1 is the first in the line.
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Apple is rather good at planned obsolescence. Intel handed them a few years of unusable machines on a platter (thanks Intel) but I’m sure they’ll find new reasons for MacOS updates to degrade performance on old machines regardless of hardware capability.
They lead the industry in how long they provide OS update support for phones/tablets and desktops/laptops. They downclock the CPU on mobile devices as the battery ages, to keep the CPU from browning out so you My system, made in 2013, won't be supported by the next OS release this coming fall, but they usually continue security updates at least one release behind. That's basically ten years of hardware support. Keep…
Apple leads the industry in using slave labour to create disposable fashion items.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/10/seven-apple-suppliers-alleged...
I know everyone is going to jump the gun and declare how mediocre Intel's offerings are in terms of power efficiency but lets not forget that this Laptop is also running RTX 3080Ti and historically more 5% performance on Alder Lake CPUs requires somehow way more power. Same thing happened during 12900K reviews. IMO - it would be interesting to see benchmark of P and U series Laptops. Honestly I do not think they are…
Such a beautiful sentence to read. Love the actual competition these days.
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Yeah - I think it's a question of what the different target markets are willing to pay. A lot of people want gaming laptops, so systems with big GPUs and big CPUs and not so great size/weight/battery life can be had relatively cheap. But most people that want big CPUs and good battery life but don't care about the GPU so much are people who need the system for their job, so manufacturers can get away with pricing tho…
Out of curiosity what jobs need a good CPU but also can't take advantage of a good GPU? It seems like most of the high performance numerical computing software today is GPU-accelerated. If performance for your job is super important, why isn't your software GPU-accelerated? I might just be naive but it's honestly hard for me to imagine why anybody would need a good CPU and not also want a good GPU.
