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> I think Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market. They definitely won the "general public use laptop" market (if you convenie
by ActorNightly 6y ago
> I think Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market.
They definitely won the "general public use laptop" market (if you conveniently ignore the rest of the laptop and OSX, which are utter crap IMO), but its important to understand that they really didn't invent anything, they just optimized. And optimizing something like this means you make the stuff that is most commonly used better, while reducing the functionality of the rest.
Compare the Asus Zephyrus RoG 14 laptop with the Macbook pro. G14 has the older Ryzen 9 4900HS chip, and while the single core performance of the MBP is better, the multi core is the same despite the 4900HZ being a last gen chip. G14 gets about 11 hours of battery time for regular use, MBP gets about 16, but the G14 also has a discrete GPU that is superior for gaming than the integrated GPU of the mac. Different configurations for different things.
Then, even ignoring the companies decision to mix and match components, the reason why you can buy any windows based laptop and install Linux on it and have 99% of the functionality working right out of the box is because of the standardization of the cpu architecture. With the Apple M1, even though Rosetta is very well built, its support is not universal across all applications, some run poorly or not at all.
And while modern compilers are smart, they have a long way to go before true cross operability with all the performance enhancements. Just look at any graphical linux distro, and the fact that all android devices out there run linux, but there isn't a way to natively run it on them without the chroot method that doesn't take advantage of the hardware.
So in the end, if you are someone that just wants a laptop with good performance and great battery life, and don't care about any particular software since most of your time will be spent on the web or in the Apple Ecosystem software, the M1 machines are definitely the right choice. However, if you want something like a dev machine with Linux where you just want to be able to git clone software and it work without any issues, you are most likely going to be better off with the "windows" based laptops with traditional AMD/Intel chips for quite some time.