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Vaguely related question for the gurus: are all Windows (/ Linux) laptops still hopelessly behind Macbooks in terms of speed? (since Apple announced the M1 and

Vaguely related question for the gurus: are all Windows (/ Linux) laptops still hopelessly behind Macbooks in terms of speed? (since Apple announced the M1 and followups I mean) I’m trying to figure out if a laptop like this one is worth the lower cpu speed

lm-lux 3y ago
to my knowledge, high end windows laptops are catching up and are even more powerful than Macs in terms of graphical compute power. However MacBooks are still the best for performance per watt and battery life.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
^low effort troll comment that breaks HN guidelines. You could have googled this and found your answer in 5 seconds(it's not something you need "gurus" for), instead of using your comment as an opportunity to call anything that's not M1 MacBook as being "hopelessly underpowered" but masquerading it as a question.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  I disagree. When I google this I get content that mostly has an agenda. I’m not deep into this subject matter so I don’t know who to trust. On HN however, I get knowledgeable replies from people who enjoy this topic (thanks everyone!). For extra context, I’m a Windows fan and I currently use a Surface Pro. I’d prefer to keep using Windows (even despite the ad/telemetry crap MS is pulling) but not if an M3 cuts my Elixir/webpack build times in half wrt a new & fast Windows laptop. So no, nothing here was “masquerading” and you need to stop making such negative assumptions about people’s motivations. The replies tell me the difference isn’t that big at all, which is great to know. Thing is, when the M1 was announced HN and twitter and other geek sites were absolutely plastered with stories about how impossibly much faster it was, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder whether that’s still the case.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >When I google this I get content that mostly has an agenda. There are dedicated review sites that do objective testing and tell you everything you need to know about current HW performace. If you're short on time to browse through it all to catch up to speed on the current state of affairs, you can use a LLM to summarize things for you. There's also Reddit where people alredy asked and debated what you want to know.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      Who exactly did I harm by asking this to a community I trust? The people who answered seemed happy to do so. But even if we don’t agree on that, I take issue with you calling me a troll and I take issue with you issue with you suggesting I’m a shill and I think an apology is in order.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Apple's primary advantage is being the first on TSMC's new process nodes, which generally yields a modest but not enormous performance advantage on single thread, no advantage for multi-thread (because Apple's CPUs have fewer cores), and only lasts for a few months before AMD is on the same process. At which point the results look like this: https://www.notebookcheck.net/R9-7945HX3D-vs-M2-Max_15073_14975.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/R9-7945HX3D-vs-M2-Max_15073_14... Which is to say, on the same process node the M-series is slower.
- seec 3y ago
  Yeah, that's it and exactly what I have been thinking for a long time. Interestingly the single core power efficiency for Apple Silicon is through the roof, yet for multicore it is rather small (13-15%). Also depending on your workload, you might really need that battery life thanks to power efficiency because being up to 40% slower, the Mac will definitely make you wait longer. All kidding aside, anyone doing anything high performance knows the advertised battery life is bullshit and if you run anything demanding it will be 2-3 hours at best when the PC would be 1-2h, which at this point is not a big deal. Anybody arguing about Apple Silicon efficiency must be using it as a Facebook machine, something that Apple Silicon is very good at, but for this Chromebooks do just fine and are infinitely cheaper. I believe this is a result of the architecture being derived from a mobile device where instant interaction for single running apps is the most important thing. As anyone could have guessed it doesn't scale very well for what PCs have been for a long time: extremely distributed computing, where the core running the UI do not have that much work to do, so a fast single core score doesn't translate in that big of a difference. Which is exactly why most people feel like PCs have been stagnating for a while, because yeah from a UI performance point of view, things havent improved that much but it doesn't matter on such a device. Just the other day I did some work on a M2 MacBook Pro (24GB version) and I was appalled at how slow the UI of Activity Monitor was on top of the general sluggishness feeling. I do not understand WTF everybody is on about Apple Silicon, it is barely competitive, and certainly not at the price they sell it.

lm-lux 3y ago

to my knowledge, high end windows laptops are catching up and are even more powerful than Macs in terms of graphical compute power. However MacBooks are still the best for performance per watt and battery life.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

^low effort troll comment that breaks HN guidelines. You could have googled this and found your answer in 5 seconds(it's not something you need "gurus" for), instead of using your comment as an opportunity to call anything that's not M1 MacBook as being "hopelessly underpowered" but masquerading it as a question.

skrebbel 3y ago
I disagree. When I google this I get content that mostly has an agenda. I’m not deep into this subject matter so I don’t know who to trust. On HN however, I get knowledgeable replies from people who enjoy this topic (thanks everyone!). For extra context, I’m a Windows fan and I currently use a Surface Pro. I’d prefer to keep using Windows (even despite the ad/telemetry crap MS is pulling) but not if an M3 cuts my Elixir/webpack build times in half wrt a new & fast Windows laptop. So no, nothing here was “masquerading” and you need to stop making such negative assumptions about people’s motivations. The replies tell me the difference isn’t that big at all, which is great to know. Thing is, when the M1 was announced HN and twitter and other geek sites were absolutely plastered with stories about how impossibly much faster it was, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder whether that’s still the case.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >When I google this I get content that mostly has an agenda. There are dedicated review sites that do objective testing and tell you everything you need to know about current HW performace. If you're short on time to browse through it all to catch up to speed on the current state of affairs, you can use a LLM to summarize things for you. There's also Reddit where people alredy asked and debated what you want to know.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    Who exactly did I harm by asking this to a community I trust? The people who answered seemed happy to do so. But even if we don’t agree on that, I take issue with you calling me a troll and I take issue with you issue with you suggesting I’m a shill and I think an apology is in order.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

Apple's primary advantage is being the first on TSMC's new process nodes, which generally yields a modest but not enormous performance advantage on single thread, no advantage for multi-thread (because Apple's CPUs have fewer cores), and only lasts for a few months before AMD is on the same process. At which point the results look like this: https://www.notebookcheck.net/R9-7945HX3D-vs-M2-Max_15073_14975.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/R9-7945HX3D-vs-M2-Max_15073_14... Which is to say, on the same process node the M-series is slower.

seec 3y ago
Yeah, that's it and exactly what I have been thinking for a long time. Interestingly the single core power efficiency for Apple Silicon is through the roof, yet for multicore it is rather small (13-15%). Also depending on your workload, you might really need that battery life thanks to power efficiency because being up to 40% slower, the Mac will definitely make you wait longer. All kidding aside, anyone doing anything high performance knows the advertised battery life is bullshit and if you run anything demanding it will be 2-3 hours at best when the PC would be 1-2h, which at this point is not a big deal. Anybody arguing about Apple Silicon efficiency must be using it as a Facebook machine, something that Apple Silicon is very good at, but for this Chromebooks do just fine and are infinitely cheaper. I believe this is a result of the architecture being derived from a mobile device where instant interaction for single running apps is the most important thing. As anyone could have guessed it doesn't scale very well for what PCs have been for a long time: extremely distributed computing, where the core running the UI do not have that much work to do, so a fast single core score doesn't translate in that big of a difference. Which is exactly why most people feel like PCs have been stagnating for a while, because yeah from a UI performance point of view, things havent improved that much but it doesn't matter on such a device. Just the other day I did some work on a M2 MacBook Pro (24GB version) and I was appalled at how slow the UI of Activity Monitor was on top of the general sluggishness feeling. I do not understand WTF everybody is on about Apple Silicon, it is barely competitive, and certainly not at the price they sell it.