21–30 of 565 posts
It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+. For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
So they are about one generation behind? That's not bad really. What's the AMD or Intel chip equivalent to the M2 or M3? Is somebody making a fanless laptop with it?
It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+. For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
This really sucks. The nice thing about high end (Mx Pro/Max) MBPs is that if you need desktop-like power, it's there, but they can also do a pretty good job pretending to be MacBook Airs and stretch that 100Wh battery far further than is possible with similarly powerful x86 laptops.
This affects ultraportables too, though. A MacBook Air performs well in bursts and only becomes limited in sustained tasks, but competing laptops don't even do burst very well and still need active cooling to boot.
On the desktop front I think AMD has been killing it but both companies need to start from scratch for laptops.
I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. The rumors about an upcoming touchscreen Mac are interesting, perhaps Apple will deign to make their ridiculously overpowered SOCs usable for general purpose computing. A man can dream..
I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. It's a nice problem to have, since for most of computing history it's been the other way around. (Meaning the hardware was the constraint, not the OS.)
Sometimes though Youtube will make the iPad uncomfortably hot and consume the battery at an insane pace.
So, I guess there's someone using the performance.
It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+. For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
If you are OK with the closed apple ecosystem, sure, but I mean, 20% is not that much for 99% of the population. Don't get me wrong, I really admire what apple has done with the M CPUs, but I personally prefer the freedom of being able to install linux, bsd, windows, and even weirder OSes like Haiku.
Single-Core Score 4133 3748 110.3%
Multi-Core Score 15437 13324 115.9%
Same maximum clock speed. So assuming no special thermals solution on the new iPad Pro such as vapour chamber. This is 10% pure IPC improvements although the M5 has 6MB L2 Cache. 2MB higher than M4.
Not shown here are the E-Core performance. Which if we were to trust the A19 Pro test they are 20 to 30% higher than previous generations. And GPU is also a lot faster on A19 Pro.
M5 also comes with 12GB Memory as baseline, which is 4GB higher than M4 you get on iPad Pro. I hope M5 MacBook Air continues to get 16GB as baseline, looking like a very decent upgrade for anyone that is on M1 or still on Intel platform. Would be perfect if MacBook Air gets Vapour Chamber like iPhone Pro. I don't mind paying slightly more for it.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseli...
Edit: Let me double down, macOS 26 is the worst OS that Apple has shipped in the last two decades.
It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+. For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
If you are OK with the closed apple ecosystem, sure, but I mean, 20% is not that much for 99% of the population. Don't get me wrong, I really admire what apple has done with the M CPUs, but I personally prefer the freedom of being able to install linux, bsd, windows, and even weirder OSes like Haiku.
I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. The rumors about an upcoming touchscreen Mac are interesting, perhaps Apple will deign to make their ridiculously overpowered SOCs usable for general purpose computing. A man can dream..
What rumors have you seen? Anytime I've seen speculation, Apple execs seem to shut that idea down. Is there more evidence this is happening? If anything, Apple's recent moves to "macify" iPadOS indicate their strategy is to tempt people over into the locked down ecosystem, rather than bring the (more) open macOS to the iPad.