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Jeff Atwood 5 years ago: "the Qualcomm hardware people told Google internally they were 5 years behind Apple on hardware. This was about 1.5 years ago, but I be

• MBCook 4y ago
  Someone had a battery life test for phones. The iPhones beat the android phones in nearly every test by hours. And they only had 60-70% of the raw battery capacity. And you know they have faster processors too. It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened. If I want a new PC laptop, it just won’t compare because no reasonable part is available for the heat/battery life I could have gotten.
  • karmelapple 4y ago
    Who went back to AMD/Intel stuff? Any Apple user is far away from that, and comparing the performance, heat, noise, and battery differences between my Intel and Apple Silicon computers, I have no desire to regularly use an Intel machine until they make some stratospheric leap. (I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)
    • MBCook 4y ago
      I meant the rest of the industry. They said “wow” and then went back to business as usual. They had talking points about how they’ll improve and performance (as always) and efficiency got talked up more. But when will any of that show up? Hardware takes time but I just don’t see reviewers demanding it. They’ll be happy if it shows up but they’re not calling out “this isn’t good enough” and I just don’t get it. How can they use an M1 and go back to a hot low battery life Intel laptop in the same price class and say “this is fine?”
      • karmelapple 4y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, now I get it! And fully agreed - once you use an M1 that's cold to the touch even while doing some heavy lifting, it's hard to imagine using an Intel machine that gets warm just running Zoom and a few browser tabs.
      • jborean93 4y ago
        What can you do about it. Outside of Apple hardware running macOS you just can't get the same. We can demand all we want but no one can offer what is available from Apple yet. I'm certainly not surprised Qualcomm/Intel/AMD want to add more fire to their feet by talking up their competition.
        • MBCook 4y ago
          But you have to demand it. People have to make clear to the vendors that this matters. As long people don’t do that everything will continue as normal. It needs to be very clear you’re not doing good enough. As long as reviewers keep ignoring the elephant in the room in their text and scores, how are you ever going to get what I’m guessing just about everyone wants? They may not know it (us Mac users were getting annoyed at heat and noise but didn’t know how much). But I’m convinced if someone built it, users would come out of the woodwork. So many people doing “office” work that doesn’t require high power machines would benefit. Qualcomm just doesn’t seem to be trying very hard in the computer segment.
          • rodgerd 4y ago
            > Qualcomm just doesn’t seem to be trying very hard in the computer segment. They're functionally a monopoly. They don't have to.
            • MBCook 4y ago
              They’re a monopoly in phones. They’re no-one of consequence in computers. That’s where I want them to try.
      • 4y ago
    • josephg 4y ago
      I did. I moved over to linux mint for at-the-desk programming (though I still use a macbook while traveling). My linux desktop idles at 0% CPU, which is something macos hasn't been able to deliver for 5+ years at this point. Current generation Intel / AMD desktop CPUs have similar performance to apple's M1/M2 chips. They just consume a lot more power. (Though apparently applying a slight underclock makes a huge difference.) I'm not sure how recent intel / AMD laptop performance compares, but a PC with an x86 chip is still a great choice.
      • MBCook 4y ago
        > They just consume a lot more power This is the thing I’m stuck on. Computers are all roughly the same speed, for the point of this discussion. But there is no contest in power. If you’re in the Windows world you have no good choices. Fast and hot to very slow and cool. Where is the “pretty fast and nicely cool” choice? Someone proved it can exist. But it’s not there and people don’t seem to be very upset about that. And I’m surprised.
        • hallway_monitor 4y ago
          Not upset but resigned I guess. Making do for now - typing this on my Macbook but my main desktop is Windows as is my work Laptop. Could Windows have better battery life? Probably only by dropping backward compatibility and moving to a Linux kernel or something radical.
          • MBCook 4y ago
            A lot of stuff on MacOS ran faster on an M1 with Rosetta 2 than it ran on the Intel chips Apple was selling the year before. For something not highly performance sensitive like office suite or line of business stuff you’d probably be fine with a half-decent ARM chip. So much of what we do these days is a web browser (ported) or a secret web browser (Electron/etc). I work in Java, that can be ported if it’s not already. I bet C#/CLR already are. It’s not perfect. It’s probably not ready for 3D rendering or 4k video editing. But a HUGE percentage of people could probably go ARM tomorrow if good chips were out there. MS has their own “Rosetta” already for running x86(-64?) on ARM. Is it slow? From my (very weak) understanding I have the impression the ARM stuff available is really cheap/slow. Not unlike the performance of the first netbooks compared to real laptops. Things that just aren’t powerful enough. Good for MS for making a dev machine. But a few good general purpose laptops with great battery life would probably move the needle a ton, even if only in the business market.
    • moomin 4y ago
      The entertaining thing here is that Apple’s walled garden is intended to keep people in, but here it’s keeping them out. The M1 is a technical marvel, but if you’re not already tied to Apple, it’s nowhere near good enough to warrant leaping that wall.
      • Dennip 4y ago
        But isn't the walled garden in thsi case part of the appeal? i.e. running windows on it bare metal would not be as performant because of all the tighly coupled hardware-software integration apple do?
        • wmf 4y ago
          The tighly coupled hardware-software integration is mostly a myth. Linux is super-fast on Apple Silicon and Windows or Android would probably also benefit.
      • rodgerd 4y ago
        "Apple should adopt Dell's business model, it will work briliantly" is a thing that Apple have heard for a long time. When they tried in the 90s they went broke and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.
    • chaostheory 4y ago
      For VR and games, Apple doesn’t compare to PCs for now until Apple Reality is released. Apple tolerates video games now because of the revenue, but they still don’t like them. The M2 is the most amazing Apple upgrade that I’ve ever had, but it’s an ecosystem that doesn’t garner enough support for non-mobile, non-iOS video games.
  • sylens 4y ago
    It is astonishing to me that people are out there buying Intel PC laptops when the M1 MBA can be had for <$1000
    • uni_rule 4y ago
      I understand the sentiment but a dead ssd won't permanently brick a large portion of x86 laptops.
      • II2II 4y ago
        More to the point: I can still access the data from the SSD even if every other component on the laptop was dead. Heck, I could pop the SSD into another laptop and continue working where I left off.
    • encryptluks2 4y ago
      An Intel laptop can be had for like $200
    • tootie 4y ago
      Well, $1000 upfront plus $100 a year for the right to develop apps.
    • borissk 4y ago
      The base MBA comes with only 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD and has very limited upgrade option. Also Apple charges crazy prices for more RAM and storage. For $1000 one can buy a Windows laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB SDD, that can cheaply be upgraded to 64GB memory and 10+TB SSD (2x SO-DIMM slots + 2x M2 PCIe slots).
      • jzb 4y ago
        Um. Cheaply to 10+ TB SSD? Where are you shopping?! I want to go there.
        • borissk 4y ago
  • tootie 4y ago
    That can't possibly be a useful benchmark. There are hundreds of Android models with different batteries and power characteristics. Was it just CPU power efficiency?
  • sunjester 4y ago
    This is very hard for me to believe, even when I see the test results. Everyone I know with an Apple phone is either over 60 or looking for a charger.
  • judge2020 4y ago
    Apple's decision to keep the A15 in the lower-tier 14 models shows that they did not expect everyone else (Qualcomm) to stop innovating on performance.
  • jiggawatts 4y ago
    The M-series is very directly comparable to, say, an AMD Zen 3 v-cache or a Zen 4 processor. In many scenarios the AMD is faster, and in others the M-series is faster. The main advantage of the M-series if for laptops on battery. Desktops, gaming, and software development is still significantly better on Intel-compatible desktops. E.g.: I can run Windows 11 with WSL 2 and Docker. That lets me develop using multiple huge ecosystems of tools seamlessly. With Apple, you get immediately relegated to a tiny corner of "optimised for M1" software, and have to either emulate or use cloud-hosting for everything else.
    • shepherdjerred 4y ago
      Also cost. You won't be M1 price/performance ratio in a laptop.
• tootie 4y ago
  Is the chip in this PC anywhere on that chart? I assume it's most similar to the latest Galaxy's which are not far behind Mac. Which is pretty much fine as far as I can tell, I don't see many CPU-bound workstation activities for most folks. And if you are CPU bound, you don't buy a micro form factor.