6 ms·

premium = an arm and a leg. My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds. It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.

saagarjha 5y ago
I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is. I could understand 20% more, but not two times. Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market. They simply will never be mainstream. My answer was to I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead I would! CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
  - dagw 5y ago
    The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
    - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
      What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15 ? It is benchmarking pretty close to the M1 Pro, and you can get it for around $1800.
      - dagw 5y ago
        Weight and real world battery life would be two things. Almost certainly build quality. The screen almost certainly isn't as nice. Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. If I need 'real' performance I'll use a chunky Ryzen/Threadripper desktop computer running Linux over any laptop on the market. Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again. Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it. edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.
        O_H_E 5y ago
        > Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. Yeah! I feel like I have been needing a word for that for sometime. Never had a mac, but surprisingly I have the same exact experience with my IT_managed_Dell+Windows+Antivirus vs my 6yo thinkpad with linux (even months of uptime) even plain process spawning from powershell is slow, that AV is just hell.
        Filligree 5y ago
        At least on the 2021 model G14/15, sleep is outright disabled. They never did get it to work. There's also a relay-based cutoff for the discrete nvidia gpu, because that was the only way Asus could find to prevent phantom power draw on battery. It still doesn't have anywhere near as good battery life as a macbook, and while the CPU is fast, it's slower than the M1.
      - 5y ago
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. Or branding... Which I can accept.
      - dagw 5y ago
        Or branding... Which I can accept. As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.
  - hpen 5y ago
    Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks owned by non tech people. You would be surprised by the fact they are everywhere.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
      I see Apple users all around me. I also live in a country where $500/month is considered a decent salary. It's the power of their very competent marketing department and nothing else; otherwise you wouldn't see so many iPhone users who spent three months of their total income for the privilege of owning this "status symbol".
      - Jcowell 5y ago
        Why does it matter if your spending three mo the of your total income when you can (and should)?pay it off monthly ?
        nicoburns 5y ago
        Err... because paying it off monthly doesn't make it any cheaper. And it still ends up being a sizeable chunk of your total purchasing power.
        Jcowell 5y ago
        No but it gives you you better means to purchase an item you otherwise wouldn’t have if you had to do it upfront. There’s greater purchasing power in buying something over time rather than all at once.
        5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
        I have no idea how much you're making (and no desire to know), but for the sake of the argument let's say it's $6k a month. Try to extrapolate our reality to your own. Would you go around with a phone that cost $18k? Would you even buy one, monthly installments or not (and then get the next one right after it comes out, like many iPhone users here tend to do)?
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    It's weird isn't it, how Apple might become the first 3 trillion dollar company.... Even if all their products are overpriced horseshit. One could almost assume people value what Apple is making and are willing to pay for it. Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.
  - simonh 5y ago
    >> I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead >I would! >CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them. Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally. Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  Such as a high end Ryzen, which eats the M1 for breakfast ? Sure.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast. >The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
    - ohgodplsno 5y ago
      This article is one of the few anandtech articles which is just straight up wrong and/or incomplete on many points, notably only comparing to (relatively) old desktop chips. A 5900HX (released in January) scores 50% higher on multithreading on cinebench, and equal on single threaded tests like Geekbench. A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you. So, really, what this is saying is that a brand new, constructor specific 5nm SoC that is tailor made with a CPU/memory quasi-direct link is about equal to a year and a half old 7nm CPU, while being twice as expensive. As much as the Apple fanboys can scream about pOwEr EfFiCciEnCy!1, making up a $1500 difference just in electricity costs is going to be hard. Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        > A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you. Confused. The MacBook Pro is also available from $2500.
      - simonh 5y ago
        > Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop I see you subscribe to the John Hodgman school of laptop design. https://youtu.be/gHG0cT_ck00 https://youtu.be/gHG0cT_ck00

saagarjha 5y ago

I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is. I could understand 20% more, but not two times. Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market. They simply will never be mainstream. My answer was to I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead I would! CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
- dagw 5y ago
  The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
  - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
    What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15 ? It is benchmarking pretty close to the M1 Pro, and you can get it for around $1800.
    - dagw 5y ago
      Weight and real world battery life would be two things. Almost certainly build quality. The screen almost certainly isn't as nice. Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. If I need 'real' performance I'll use a chunky Ryzen/Threadripper desktop computer running Linux over any laptop on the market. Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again. Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it. edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.
      - O_H_E 5y ago
        > Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. Yeah! I feel like I have been needing a word for that for sometime. Never had a mac, but surprisingly I have the same exact experience with my IT_managed_Dell+Windows+Antivirus vs my 6yo thinkpad with linux (even months of uptime) even plain process spawning from powershell is slow, that AV is just hell.
      - Filligree 5y ago
        At least on the 2021 model G14/15, sleep is outright disabled. They never did get it to work. There's also a relay-based cutoff for the discrete nvidia gpu, because that was the only way Asus could find to prevent phantom power draw on battery. It still doesn't have anywhere near as good battery life as a macbook, and while the CPU is fast, it's slower than the M1.
    - 5y ago
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. Or branding... Which I can accept.
    - dagw 5y ago
      Or branding... Which I can accept. As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.
- hpen 5y ago
  Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks owned by non tech people. You would be surprised by the fact they are everywhere.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    I see Apple users all around me. I also live in a country where $500/month is considered a decent salary. It's the power of their very competent marketing department and nothing else; otherwise you wouldn't see so many iPhone users who spent three months of their total income for the privilege of owning this "status symbol".
    - Jcowell 5y ago
      Why does it matter if your spending three mo the of your total income when you can (and should)?pay it off monthly ?
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        Err... because paying it off monthly doesn't make it any cheaper. And it still ends up being a sizeable chunk of your total purchasing power.
        Jcowell 5y ago
        No but it gives you you better means to purchase an item you otherwise wouldn’t have if you had to do it upfront. There’s greater purchasing power in buying something over time rather than all at once.
      - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
        I have no idea how much you're making (and no desire to know), but for the sake of the argument let's say it's $6k a month. Try to extrapolate our reality to your own. Would you go around with a phone that cost $18k? Would you even buy one, monthly installments or not (and then get the next one right after it comes out, like many iPhone users here tend to do)?
- lillecarl 5y ago
  It's weird isn't it, how Apple might become the first 3 trillion dollar company.... Even if all their products are overpriced horseshit. One could almost assume people value what Apple is making and are willing to pay for it. Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.
- simonh 5y ago
  >> I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead >I would! >CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them. Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally. Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
Such as a high end Ryzen, which eats the M1 for breakfast ? Sure.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast. >The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    This article is one of the few anandtech articles which is just straight up wrong and/or incomplete on many points, notably only comparing to (relatively) old desktop chips. A 5900HX (released in January) scores 50% higher on multithreading on cinebench, and equal on single threaded tests like Geekbench. A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you. So, really, what this is saying is that a brand new, constructor specific 5nm SoC that is tailor made with a CPU/memory quasi-direct link is about equal to a year and a half old 7nm CPU, while being twice as expensive. As much as the Apple fanboys can scream about pOwEr EfFiCciEnCy!1, making up a $1500 difference just in electricity costs is going to be hard. Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      > A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you. Confused. The MacBook Pro is also available from $2500.
    - simonh 5y ago
      > Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop I see you subscribe to the John Hodgman school of laptop design. https://youtu.be/gHG0cT_ck00 https://youtu.be/gHG0cT_ck00