141–150 of 168 posts
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> I didn't see Apple anywhere near the top of the list for CPU single or multithreaded Probably wasn't normalized as perf per watt.
>Probably wasn't normalized as perf per watt. Of course, that is a marketing metric, not something to genuinely care.
Better battery life + less heat = more comfort.
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After some years of a 15" 2016 MacBook Pro (perhaps the worst laptop Apple ever made) at work, the M1 Max that replaced it was a revelation. I have no use for a fast GPU (in fact one of my pet peeves about the 2016 MBP was that they eliminated the no-discrete-GPU option that prior 15"s had, resulting in far worse thermals for no gains for many users). Your milage may, of course, vary, but some of us appreciate a fast…
>the poor thing never gets to do anything other than displaying GUIs in my case... This is kind of my point. What actual CPU stuff is done in 2023? Its why Apple's marketing focuses so much on battery life. For a year, they won a competition that no one had cared to win.
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After some years of a 15" 2016 MacBook Pro (perhaps the worst laptop Apple ever made) at work, the M1 Max that replaced it was a revelation. I have no use for a fast GPU (in fact one of my pet peeves about the 2016 MBP was that they eliminated the no-discrete-GPU option that prior 15"s had, resulting in far worse thermals for no gains for many users). Your milage may, of course, vary, but some of us appreciate a fast…
>the poor thing never gets to do anything other than displaying GUIs in my case... This is kind of my point. What actual CPU stuff is done in 2023? Its why Apple's marketing focuses so much on battery life. For a year, they won a competition that no one had cared to win.
People forget that it is not just the processor that consumes power. The reason the new MacBooks are so efficient is not just because they are ARM-based, it is also because they have incredibly energy efficient screens, WiFi, RAM, SSDs, etc. They can achieve this through their sophisticated manufacturing process, with highly integrated components directly soldered onto the board, a fact that is widely (and correctly)…
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I have had both experiences. The base system for Linux will be great for battery life (has been ruthlessly optimized for power savings by the biggest companies in the world), but some of the desktop software on top will brutalize your battery. I've experimented a lot (mainly on Fedora) and the biggest offenders are browsers, but also sometimes Gnome gets in a bad state and eats up a lot of CPU. It's often gjs eating…
> has been ruthlessly optimized for power savings by the biggest companies in the world It has been ruthlessly optimized to save power for servers with greatly documented hardware structures. It has not been optimized for Desktop OS, for Bluetooth, Sleep, WiFi, graphics card power saving etc. I am a tab zero guy, for the record. I've been using computers since Windows 3, so I'm very sensitive towards intensive proces…
i've clocked ~8 hours of media time with a T420s with an ultrabay battery and tlp/powertop reporting an average of 6-8w during the process. Regular battery + the extra ultrabay battery put the capacity up to about 7.7Ah; about the same range of battery capacity as a newish macbook pro.
a t420s is a very old core machine at this point. I would suspect the same conditions with a similar amount of battery with a modern processor could do a lot better; but i'm getting too old to sit in front of a screen for 8+ hours of media time, honestly -- and lately with USB-PD and power banks I have been skewing towards buying ultrabook style laptops and accessorizing via USB3 rather than with proprietary expansion slots.
I don't know what the media time on something like a laptop with an N100/linux + a powerbank, but I suspect it'd be quite a long time.
typo: meant 7.7aH
The 14-inch MacBook Pro pricing quoted in the article seems wrong. Looking at the US Apple Store right now, it has the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro (10-core) cpu + 32GB ram and 1TB storage as US$2599, rather an US$3099. Seems outright cheaper than the Thinkpad x13s.
Interesting, when I wrote the article the prices were what I could generate on the Apple website, but you are correct that they are not the same now. I should have taken screenshots! Thanks for the heads up, I'll update the article to reflect that :)
> Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Slower than a 3 years old M1... It's 2023 people..
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AMD is getting here, certainly... the latest 7430HS mini PCs still use 6-8W at idle though, which is quite a bit more than ARM still. I've been using an m1 air as a personall laptop and when traveling rarely even think about having to plug it in... for my limited use with the screen around 60% brightness, I can use it all day and then some. Mostly text/email or remote editing (wireguard, ssh, vs code).
Isn't 7430HS a Zen3 chip? Presumably Zen4 will be better. Remains to he seen, though.
I'd be much more interested in the Linux situation on this laptop. Most of the UI applications I use casually or CLI apps are available on ARM (I have them running fine on a Pinephone, so the experience on a laptop will only be better). But not sure how the dev workflow would be: Podman, IntelliJ, Sublime Text, etc.. And some casual stuff like Calibre, Thunderbird, Joplin. Oh and how much would the battery life impro…
* Battery Life. ~6/7 hours max as it currently (linux-x13s 6.4). There is a lot of room for improvement, which will happen as more people tune/tweak.
* Performance. Honestly, the only noticeable issue is lzma2 compression. It's ass slow, even when using 8 threads. Other then that- Gnome (Wayland), CLion, Firefox, and Rust have no issues. I can't think of any performance issues when comparing it to my HP 14t-ea000, which is a 11th gen i7.
* Stability. Firefox occasionally crashes and I've not done enough digging to file a ticket on it yet. The WiFi Drivers crash on suspend (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217239) but it's being worked on. The GPU crashes on startup but recovers. Going to file a kernel report on this one when I get around to it. I'd put it at 95% of what I'd expect on my x86-64 laptop.
It runs cooler than my HP, which runs on the hotter side. Port selection is limiting, but having a 5G Modem is cool. Arch has almost all of their packages cross compiled to arm64, and I've not run into an issue where there was a package I needed that wasn't there.
TL;DR. A Very functional laptop. I've started using it as my primary laptop, but still carry my HP with me if I'm traveling somewhere. Give it a few months for the kernel issues to be ironed out and it'll be a very nice laptop.