10 ms·

Just to take on one of your points: the RAM you are talking about is not truly comparable. Sure, you can add DIMMs to a PC motherboard. M2 "unified" memory band

Just to take on one of your points: the RAM you are talking about is not truly comparable. Sure, you can add DIMMs to a PC motherboard. M2 "unified" memory bandwidth to the on-chip RAM, LPDDR5-6400, exceeds 100Gb/sec. That's incredible bandwidth. So yes, there's a cost tradeoff, and the lack of modularity means the upgrade path is "get a new device." That's frustrating. That's actually been true of high end PCs for decades, given the constant churn in socket standards and power requirements, but fans of building their own PCs generally don't like to acknowledge it. The criticism of the onboard flash is more valid - it's costly and if you don't get the dual bank setup, paying yes, a big premium like I did for a 512Gb version, performance isn't great. https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmarkhttps://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmark https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-... The lack of an upgrade path is, again, not great, but ask yourself honestly, aside from some ThinkPads which really were nicely upgreadable in the past, how many laptops are upgradeable and what can you upgrade? Your bias ("Apple charges an absurd amount," for "tiny little features that real computers have in spades") is showing and it isn't pretty. Show us the modular laptop with comparable performance or shut up; you're stuck in the nineties. Go on - find me a PC laptop that performs better than an M2 and let's look at prices, weight, and battery life. Oh, and modularity. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_processors https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_proces... Or even show us your PC build that is comparable to the Mac Studio and let's talk about how big, noisy, and power-hungry it is; these are things that people who want to use real computers in real offices and studios care about, more than PC hot-rodders who, let's face it, are mostly gamers bragging to each other about their frame rates rather than professionals using computers as tools.

howinteresting 4y ago
A 7950X capped to 65W is around 40% faster than an M1 Ultra. Capped to 105W it's almost 50% ahead (according to CPUMark). For a workstation there is no comparison in terms of either performance or price. (Mac does have the high-bandwidth unified memory going for it which can make a difference in some situations.)
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Yes, there are configurations where a PC is a way better machine for the money, especially where Apple doesn't offer a directly comparable alternative. However, that doesn't mean, this applies in general, especially with laptops rather Apple is ahead of the game. So it varies by category and configuration.
- paulrpotts 4y ago
  It will be interesting to see whether Apple can continue with M3s, etc. I think they are facing pretty hard process limitations and I'm not sure that adding parallelism will get them huge gains on normal workloads, so they may be stuck at a plateau for a while, but we'll see.

howinteresting 4y ago

A 7950X capped to 65W is around 40% faster than an M1 Ultra. Capped to 105W it's almost 50% ahead (according to CPUMark). For a workstation there is no comparison in terms of either performance or price. (Mac does have the high-bandwidth unified memory going for it which can make a difference in some situations.)

_ph_ 4y ago
Yes, there are configurations where a PC is a way better machine for the money, especially where Apple doesn't offer a directly comparable alternative. However, that doesn't mean, this applies in general, especially with laptops rather Apple is ahead of the game. So it varies by category and configuration.
paulrpotts 4y ago
It will be interesting to see whether Apple can continue with M3s, etc. I think they are facing pretty hard process limitations and I'm not sure that adding parallelism will get them huge gains on normal workloads, so they may be stuck at a plateau for a while, but we'll see.