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Apple Silicon is optimized for performance per watt, where they beat the holy living pants off AMD and Intel. They then take this hardware and stretch it to th

Apple Silicon is optimized for performance per watt, where they beat the holy living pants off AMD and Intel. They then take this hardware and stretch it to the point where it does that vast majority of things that their desktop client market wants to do, and does that very well. Apple has intentionally given up on going for the absolute fastest top end CPU horsepower, either in single core or multi core. If you want to run massive GPU loads, that's not a market they want to kill themselves for. You'd be better off running that in the cloud, anyway where you can rent the hardware you need for that for a few dollars, then throw it away when you're done. But that doesn't sell clicks or ads. Only the blood curdlingest zit poppingest single or giga multicore numbers will do for the mainstream media. Meanwhile, Apple continues to make billions and billions of dollars optimizing their hardware and their software to best serve the largest number of customers they can, and optimizing for the best performance per watt for the broadest possible array of customers. And do so in a way that most of these machines can provide better price/performance than most anything else on the market, and better battery lifetime than anything else in the market. Which makes a lot of people mad, and so they have to write nasty articles about it. Hell, the MacBook Air 15" with 24GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD is still way more laptop than 95% of people need (better than the standard dev spec laptops in 99% of even the MANGA companies), and for those people who do want bigger and faster machines, Apple can still provide that, too.

tagrun 3y ago
People buying desktop computers care about performance and price, not battery life or the fruit logo on the case. You'll find it difficult to convince many people who are not already locked in Apple's walled garden and sense of consumerism around its branding to pay $4000 for such a performance, with limited RAM/disk, and no real path to upgrades or user repairs. > most of these machines can provide better price/performance than most anything else on the market, I agree, for better performance/price though, you wouldn't buy from Apple. (A meta comment: I find it difficult to comprehend how people can become so emotionally invested in a company. Finding an excuse to every single shortcoming of Apple, not leaving any criticism unanswered for them.)
- bradknowles 3y ago
  Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. You can't, because it doesn't exist. Here's a hint -- the price is much closer to $1000 than $4000. I've been a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the 128k Mac, a month before the Super Bowl commercial where Apple officially introduced the thing. Yeah, that famous one. It took only five minutes of playing around with the prototypes of what came to be called MacWrite and MacPaint (because those were the only two pieces of prototype software available yet) to convince me that this was the future of computing, and that all computers should work like this. But I'm also a Mac realist. I fully recognize that there are markets that Mac doesn't serve well, like Enterprise. Apple has always understood the workgroup level and served that market well, but as you scale up, they do worse and worse. The fact that the Mac works well in an Enterprise is in spite of Apple design philosophy, not because of it. And I also understand that there are markets where Apple makes no attempt to serve that market, because they don't consider it worthwhile -- whether I agree with them or not. I even did a short six month contract working for Apple Retail Software Engineering, where I worked with the team that developed all the proprietary software that the Apple Retail personnel use, whether that's everyone in the stores, or the people back at HQ that are coordinating with the people in the stores. I delivered a CI/CD system for them, so that they would no longer have to do all the building of all their software on the laptops of the individual developers. After six months, I had contributed code to each of their main code bases (iOS, macOS, and Linux for their back-end servers) to get the to compile on the CI/CD system, and the rest of my job was done. And in the process, I learned that Apple is a company I am happy to be a customer of, but I don't ever want to work there again.
  - nateb2022 3y ago
    > Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. I will happily be the one to tell you. For between $600-700 you can get a gaming laptop from MSI, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and the like with a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU (e.g. i5 13420H), 8-16 GB of RAM, and a RTX 3050 or better, along with a 512GB-1TB SSD. Single-core performance is just shy of the M2, multi-core performance beats the M2, GPU performance is significantly better, and the only major shortfall is battery life. As others have said, the M-series is great at power efficiency, but if performance is your only criteria there are significantly cheaper alternatives. Sure, you're going to have to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time and it will probably sound like a jet engine at times, however Apple is NOT the leader in value for performance as you believe. Regarding battery life, you could approach Apple levels of usage time by undervolting your CPU. Depending on your configuration and hardware, you could gain a couple more hours of usage time by undervolting as well as using integrated graphics and disabling the GPU in favor of integrated graphics.

tagrun 3y ago

People buying desktop computers care about performance and price, not battery life or the fruit logo on the case. You'll find it difficult to convince many people who are not already locked in Apple's walled garden and sense of consumerism around its branding to pay $4000 for such a performance, with limited RAM/disk, and no real path to upgrades or user repairs. > most of these machines can provide better price/performance than most anything else on the market, I agree, for better performance/price though, you wouldn't buy from Apple. (A meta comment: I find it difficult to comprehend how people can become so emotionally invested in a company. Finding an excuse to every single shortcoming of Apple, not leaving any criticism unanswered for them.)

bradknowles 3y ago
Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. You can't, because it doesn't exist. Here's a hint -- the price is much closer to $1000 than $4000. I've been a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the 128k Mac, a month before the Super Bowl commercial where Apple officially introduced the thing. Yeah, that famous one. It took only five minutes of playing around with the prototypes of what came to be called MacWrite and MacPaint (because those were the only two pieces of prototype software available yet) to convince me that this was the future of computing, and that all computers should work like this. But I'm also a Mac realist. I fully recognize that there are markets that Mac doesn't serve well, like Enterprise. Apple has always understood the workgroup level and served that market well, but as you scale up, they do worse and worse. The fact that the Mac works well in an Enterprise is in spite of Apple design philosophy, not because of it. And I also understand that there are markets where Apple makes no attempt to serve that market, because they don't consider it worthwhile -- whether I agree with them or not. I even did a short six month contract working for Apple Retail Software Engineering, where I worked with the team that developed all the proprietary software that the Apple Retail personnel use, whether that's everyone in the stores, or the people back at HQ that are coordinating with the people in the stores. I delivered a CI/CD system for them, so that they would no longer have to do all the building of all their software on the laptops of the individual developers. After six months, I had contributed code to each of their main code bases (iOS, macOS, and Linux for their back-end servers) to get the to compile on the CI/CD system, and the rest of my job was done. And in the process, I learned that Apple is a company I am happy to be a customer of, but I don't ever want to work there again.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  > Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. I will happily be the one to tell you. For between $600-700 you can get a gaming laptop from MSI, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and the like with a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU (e.g. i5 13420H), 8-16 GB of RAM, and a RTX 3050 or better, along with a 512GB-1TB SSD. Single-core performance is just shy of the M2, multi-core performance beats the M2, GPU performance is significantly better, and the only major shortfall is battery life. As others have said, the M-series is great at power efficiency, but if performance is your only criteria there are significantly cheaper alternatives. Sure, you're going to have to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time and it will probably sound like a jet engine at times, however Apple is NOT the leader in value for performance as you believe. Regarding battery life, you could approach Apple levels of usage time by undervolting your CPU. Depending on your configuration and hardware, you could gain a couple more hours of usage time by undervolting as well as using integrated graphics and disabling the GPU in favor of integrated graphics.