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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#311

Post by Aurornis »

chmod775 wrote: post #220
Aurornis wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point? Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high…

They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do. A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.

> The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.

This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.

For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage.

For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for multi threaded work.

Anyone claiming laptop CPUs can’t keep up with desktop CPUs hasn’t been paying attention. The latest laptops are amazing.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#312

Post by pjerem »

2716057 wrote: post #141

As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. The worst scenario I could imagine is that one has to pay a premium for fully-owned hardware simply because consumer's desire for it becomes an oddity and it is thus sold in low quantities. The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice…

> As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them.

That's not true at all.

There are a lot of people willing to buy smartphones with small screen or smartphones with Linux or any other OS than iOS or Android.

But those people are not enough to justify the gigantic initial investment that is necessary to provide viable products in this market. And the existing actors aren't interested in those niche.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#313

Post by bigfishrunning »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
guardian5x wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.

Sure, but the price increase will be less, because less ram. Also, the need to keep buying new computers will decrease, because this year's computer isn't much better then last years (but now we can run more/better software!)

Less bloat is 100% always a good thing, no matter what the market conditions are.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#314

Post by ryandrake »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
skydhash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.

I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.

I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.

And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#315

Post by embedding-shape »

Aurornis wrote: post #308
embedding-shape wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're ultimately laptops, you won't be able to squeeze out the same amount of performance from a laptop compared to a desktop, regardless of the hardware. If you haven't tried out a desktop CPU in a while, I highly recommend you giving it a try if you're used to only using laptops, even when in the same class the difference is obvious.

I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop. For CPU-bound tasks like compiling they’re not that different. For GPU tasks my desktop wins by far but it also consumes many times more power to run the giant GPU. If you think laptops are behind consumer desktops for normal tasks like compiling code you probably haven’t used a recent MacBook Pro.

> I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.

What are the exact CPU models used here though? Since my point was about CPUs in the "same class", and it's really hard to see if this is actually the case here.

And yes, I've played around with the recent Apple CPUs, all the way up to M4 Pro (I think, thinking about it I'm not 100% sure) and still I'd say the same class of CPUs will do better in a desktop rather than a laptop.

If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe smaller than other brands.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#316

Post by TheRoque »

margalabargala wrote: post #304
TheRoque wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas. And even if we figured out…

Expanding renewables to the easily replaceable items like power plants, generators, and most consumer vehicles would radically reduce oil usage to where it becomes a minor concern. Also things like biodiesel exist. A more sustainable, renewable-forward, electrified reality is easily possible. There is not a risk of resource shortage of copper. The doomer and prepper talking points you're parroting are not based in re…

[flagged]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#317

Post by moichael »

redbell wrote: post #310

In a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.

I thought it was going to be one of those emoji URLs at first but I was also surprised by that

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#318

Post by ryandrake »

sfn42 wrote: post #269
vladvasiliu wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many Electron apps are extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify sometimes finds a way to lag, when it's just a freaking list of text. Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd figure your b…

Nearly all apps are sluggish for a very clear reason - the average dev is ass. It's possible to make fast apps using electron, just like it's possible to make fast apps using anything else. People complain about react too, react is fast as fuck. I can make react apps snappy as hell. It's just crappy devs.

Yea, these applications are typically not slow just because the use Electron (although it's often a contributor). But the underlying reason why they are slow is the same reason why they are using Electron: developer skill.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#319

Post by captn3m0 »

fishbacon wrote: post #52
imtringued wrote: post #41

I just realized that this blog site is pretending to be malware. I opened the tab and was constantly switching between the blog and writing this HN comment (I deleted the rest of the comment after realizing it) and was wondering where the tab went and kept opening it over and over again, then I realized that it completely rewrote the tab title with NSFW content (one of the title contained the world "nudes" with a fak…

The pop-up is about disabling javascript, to avoid this kind of website doing this kind of thing. I thought it was clever. But it also seems ham-fisted, and in poor taste.

The author also maintains https://disable-javascript.org/, which the pop-up links to. And has the exact script + titles used.

> You may want to consider linking to this site, to educate any script-enabled users on how to disable JavaScript in some of the most commonly used browsers. The following code uses scare tactics to do so.

> When added to your website, it will change the icon and the title of your website's tab to some of the most unhinged things imaginable once the user sends your tab to the background. Upon re-activation, the script will display a popover to the user informing them about the joke and referring them to this initiative.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#320

Post by ryandrake »

rafaelmn wrote: post #55
guessmyname wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…

Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well. I don't know your workloads, but for me personally 64 GB is the ceiling buffer on RAM - I can run entire k8s cluster locally with that and the M5 Pro with top cores is same CPU as M5 Max. I don't need the GPU - the local AI story and OSS models are just a toy for my use-cases and I'm always going to shell out for the API/frontier capabilities. I'm even…

I thought my Z620 with 128GB of RAM was excessive! Actually, HP says they support up to 192GB of RAM, but for whatever reason the machine won't POST with more than 128GB (4Rx4) in it. Flawed motherboard?
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