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They aren't really. There are faster Intel and Ryzen CPUs for far less than what Apple asks for an M2 Max. You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900

They aren't really. There are faster Intel and Ryzen CPUs for far less than what Apple asks for an M2 Max. You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100, the same price as a 13" M2 MBA with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. The i9 13900H will outperform the M2 Max too. Really the only place the Mac wins is efficiency and against Intel rivals GPU performance. And if you don't care as much about having as nice a screen you can usually find something with a better discrete GPU at the same price.

p_j_w 3y ago
> You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100 Yes, but then you’re stuck with an Asus. Having been there before, that’s a hard pass. The real comparison for Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.
- jwells89 3y ago
  And there are very few laptops that can compete on metrics like fan noise and ability to run at full performance unplugged without nuking the battery. It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It’s disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee when I’m pushing it, and my 16” M1 Max MBP doesn’t. It’s also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are apparently hard to come by.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    It really depends on the workload. I was working Sysops for a Mac-based shop during the Apple Silicon announcement, and we had a lot of broken Docker containers on ARM. When I left, your options as a Mac dev was: - Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle temps of 70-80c when building for production OR - Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler system Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      That’s just the natural outcome of needing to emulate anything. x86 machines running any OS have similar issues emulating other architectures — see how much muscle it takes to competently emulate the now-ancient Wii U for example. It just so happens that emulation of other platforms on x86 isn’t necessary all that frequently. There’s other issues with Docker on macOS, but those can be worked around (see OrbStack for some such improvements). This should become less of a problem as it becomes more normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups. There’s also the possibility that “shipping the jungle” will fall back out of favor, which would fix various other papercuts that result from Docker’s tight coupling with Linux.
    - WWLink 3y ago
      To be fair, I find using docker on anything but Linux to be an awful experience lol
scarface_74 3y ago
If I don’t care about a laptop with a better screen, battery life, not running so hot that it ensures that there will never be in little Scarfaces if I put in on my lap and it sounding like a 747 when I open three Chrome tabs…an x86 laptop is fine?
mikestew 3y ago
You can get an Asus... If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then we can just stop right there. That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-end commodity machines will always have a better price than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen, hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!
- goosedragons 3y ago
  It has a 120Hz 2880x1620 15" OLED screen. That's 220 PPI. If that's "fuzzy" then the $200 more expensive 15" MacBook Air is "fuzzy" too with worse blacks and no per-pixel backlight and only 60Hz refresh rate. Unless 4 PPI is the difference between fuzzy and not fuzzy. And $400 extra to get a 1TB SSD? Seriously?

p_j_w 3y ago

> You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100 Yes, but then you’re stuck with an Asus. Having been there before, that’s a hard pass. The real comparison for Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.

jwells89 3y ago
And there are very few laptops that can compete on metrics like fan noise and ability to run at full performance unplugged without nuking the battery. It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It’s disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee when I’m pushing it, and my 16” M1 Max MBP doesn’t. It’s also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are apparently hard to come by.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  It really depends on the workload. I was working Sysops for a Mac-based shop during the Apple Silicon announcement, and we had a lot of broken Docker containers on ARM. When I left, your options as a Mac dev was: - Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle temps of 70-80c when building for production OR - Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler system Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    That’s just the natural outcome of needing to emulate anything. x86 machines running any OS have similar issues emulating other architectures — see how much muscle it takes to competently emulate the now-ancient Wii U for example. It just so happens that emulation of other platforms on x86 isn’t necessary all that frequently. There’s other issues with Docker on macOS, but those can be worked around (see OrbStack for some such improvements). This should become less of a problem as it becomes more normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups. There’s also the possibility that “shipping the jungle” will fall back out of favor, which would fix various other papercuts that result from Docker’s tight coupling with Linux.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    To be fair, I find using docker on anything but Linux to be an awful experience lol

scarface_74 3y ago

If I don’t care about a laptop with a better screen, battery life, not running so hot that it ensures that there will never be in little Scarfaces if I put in on my lap and it sounding like a 747 when I open three Chrome tabs…an x86 laptop is fine?

mikestew 3y ago

You can get an Asus... If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then we can just stop right there. That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-end commodity machines will always have a better price than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen, hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!

goosedragons 3y ago
It has a 120Hz 2880x1620 15" OLED screen. That's 220 PPI. If that's "fuzzy" then the $200 more expensive 15" MacBook Air is "fuzzy" too with worse blacks and no per-pixel backlight and only 60Hz refresh rate. Unless 4 PPI is the difference between fuzzy and not fuzzy. And $400 extra to get a 1TB SSD? Seriously?