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IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers wo

by cletus 2y ago

IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]. As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in all, battery life seems to be about the same. I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some things were better but some weren't. Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product however. [1]: https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-claims-debunked https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-claim... EDIT: added link

ajross 2y ago
> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  Indeed. Have we already forgotten about the RDF?
  - coldtea 2y ago
    No, it was just always a meaningless term...
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - jimbokun 2y ago
      Was simply a phrase to acknowledge that Jobs was better at giving demos than anyone who ever lived.
- dijit 2y ago
  You can claim Apple is dishonest for a few reasons. 1) Graphs often are unannotatted. 2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path). 3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt. However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy. The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them. *EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
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  - Brybry 2y ago
    "This thing is incredible," Jobs said. "It's the first supercomputer on a chip.... We think it's going to set the industry on fire." "The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III" - Steve Jobs (1999) [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/ https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
    - dijit 2y ago
      Thats cool, but literally last millennium. And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium. What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue- EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-just-carefully-select-its-truths/ https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju...; it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
- deleted 2y ago
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- mort96 2y ago
  Interesting, by what benchmark did you compare the G4 and the P3? I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.
  - dblohm7 2y ago
    I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or SSE on Intel.
    - 0x457 2y ago
      Ah so the way Intel advertises their chips. Got it.
      - mort96 2y ago
        Yeah, and we rightfully criticize Intel for the same and we distrust their benchmarks
- mc32 2y ago
  Didn’t he have to use two PPC procs to get the equivalent perf you’d get on a P3? Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz! But Steve that’s two procs vs one! I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.
- deleted 2y ago
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- leptons 2y ago
  Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk", but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's, but that was their marketing angle from the 1990's.
  - galad87 2y ago
    From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/ https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export the G4 to many countries due to its “supercomputer” classification by the US government.
    - m000 2y ago
      It seems that US government was buying too much into tech hypes at the turn of the millenium. Around the same period PS2 exports were also restricted [1]. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        The PS2 was used in supercomputing clusters.
  - georgespencer 2y ago
    > Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk" It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1]. > but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.) The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer. You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance. This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context. This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3] > Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!). The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second. Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade? [^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.... [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/media/File:Supercomputers-history.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med... [^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/17/g4.ban.idg/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c... [^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance
- brokencode 2y ago
  Have any examples from the past decade? Especially in the context of how exaggerated the claims are from PC and Android brands they are competing with?
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  - lynndotpy 2y ago
    Apple recently claimed that RAM in their Macbooks is equivalent to 2x the RAM in any other machine, in defense of the 8GB starting point. In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
    - dmitrygr 2y ago
      > The secret is heavy reliance on swap You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
      - ethanwillis 2y ago
        How convenient :)
        deleted 2y ago
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      - monsieurbanana 2y ago
        Regardless of what you can't tell, he's absolutely right regarding Apple's claims: saying that a 8gb mac is as good as a 16gb non-mac is laughable.
        dmitrygr 2y ago
        That was never said. They said 8gb mac is similar to a 16gb non-Mac
- windowsrookie 2y ago
  While certainly misleading, there were situations where the G4 was incredibly fast for the time. I remember being able to edit Video in iMove on a 12" G4 Laptop. At that time there was no equivalent x86 machine.
- jmull 2y ago
  If you have to go back 20+ years for an example…
- n9 2y ago
  Worked in an engineering lab at the time of the G4 introduction and I can contest that the G4 was a very, very fast CPU for scientific workloads. Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.) A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench. Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
  - ajross 2y ago
    It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists. There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86, though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from stale links), and the reality distortion field did the rest.
  - seec 2y ago
    Funny you mention that machine I still have one of those laying around. It was a very cool machine indeed with a very capable graphics card but that's about it. It did some things better/faster than a Pentium III PC but only if you went for the bottom of the barrel unit and crippled the software support (MMX just like another reply mentioned). On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out). They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better. Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency). Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...
Aurornis 2y ago
> ME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. Okay, but your example was about battery life: > LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1] And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life. Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090 comparison was completely wrong and designed to be misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-nvidia/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-... This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.
- vel0city 2y ago
  You're right, its not 19 hours claimed. It was more than even that. > HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
  - seaal 2y ago
    the absurdness was difference in claimed battery life vs actual battery life. 19 vs 2 is more absurd than 22.5 vs 12 > Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively. Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.
moogly 2y ago
> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. I guess you weren't around during the PowerPC days... Because that's a laughable statement.
- imwillofficial 2y ago
  All I remember is tanks in the commercials. We need more tanks in commercials.
- oblio 2y ago
  I have no idea who's down voting you. They were lying through their teeth about CPU performance back then. A PC half the price was smoking their top of the line stuff.
  - seec 2y ago
    That's funny you say that, because this is precisely the time, I started buying Macs (I got a Pismo PowerBook G3 gifted and then bought an iBook G4). And my experience was that for sure, if you put as much money into a PC than in a Mac you would get MUCH better performance. What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut choice. As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that impressive. Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference. And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall story. They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't that performant in the real world. And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient game) worse than a cheapo PC.
syncsynchalt 2y ago
> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results. Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).
moooo99 2y ago
They are pretty honest when it comes to battery life claims, they’re less honest when it comes to benchmark graphs
- underlogic 2y ago
  I don't think less honest covers it and can't believe anything their marketing says after the 3090 claims. Maybe it's true, maybe not. We'll see from the reviews. Well assuming the reviewers weren't paid off with an "evaluation unit".
bvrmn 2y ago
BTW I get 19 hours from DELL XPS and Latitude. It's Linux with custom DE and Vim as IDE though.
- amarka 2y ago
  I get about 21 hours from mine, it's running Windows but powered off.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  This is why Apple can be slightly more honest about their battery specs, they don’t have the OS working against them. Unfortunately most DELLs XPS will be running Windows, so it is still misleading to provide specs based on what the hardware could do if not sabotaged.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I wonder if it’s like webpages. The numbers are calculated before marketing adds the crapware and ruins all of your hard work.
- wklm 2y ago
  can you share more details about your setup?
  - bvrmn 2y ago
    Archlinux, mitigations (spectre alike) off, X11, OpenBox, bmpanel with only CPU/IO indicator. Light theme everywhere. Opera in power save mode. `powertop --auto-tune` and `echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo` Current laptop is Latitude 7390.
    - ribit 2y ago
      Right, so you are disabling all performance features and effectively turning your CPU into a low–end low–power SKU. Of course you’d get better battery life. It’s not the same thing though.
izacus 2y ago
> LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. For literal YEARS, Apple battery life claims were a running joke on how inaccurate and overinflated they were.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I’ve never known a time when Dell, IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Alien, weren’t lying through their teeth about battery times. What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I’ve been using their laptops since the last G4 which is twenty years. They’ve always been substantially more accurate about battery times.
  - ruszki 2y ago
    The problem with arguing about battery life this way is that it's highly dependent on usage patterns. For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop, which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours. But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a useless metric for me, because all of them are shit. But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run several "micro"services at once, have constant internet transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half hours.
    - lukevp 2y ago
      You should try a MacBook Pro someday. It would still last all day with that workload. I had an XPS at work and it would last 1.5 hrs. My Apple laptop with the same workload lasts 6-8 hours easily. I never undocked the dell because of the performance issues. I undock the mac all the time because I can trust it to last.
      - 2y ago
bee_rider 2y ago
Controlling the OS is probably a big help there. At least, I saw lots of complaints about my zenbook model’s battery not hitting the spec. It was easy to hit or exceed it in Linux, but you have to tell it not to randomly spin up the CPU.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I had to work my ass off on my Fujitsu Lifebook to get 90% of the estimate, even on Linux. I even worked on a kernel patch for the Transmeta CPU, based on unexploited settings in the CPU documentation, but it came to no or negligible difference in power draw, which I suppose is why Linus didn’t do it in the first place.
nabakin 2y ago
Maybe for battery life, but definitely not when it comes to CPU/GPU performance. Tbf, no chip company is, but Apple is particularly egregious. Their charts assume best case multi-core performance when users rarely ever use all cores at once. They'd have you thinking it's the equivalent of a 3090 or that you get double the frames you did before when the reality is more like 10% gains.
dylan604 2y ago
Yeah, the assumption seems to be that using less battery by one component means that the power will just magically go unused. As with everything else in life, as soon as something stops using a resource something else fills the vacuum to take advantage of the resource.
treflop 2y ago
Apple is always honest but they know how to make you believe something that isn’t true.
bmitc 2y ago
> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. In nearly every single release, their claims are well above actual performance.

by cletus 2y ago

ajross 2y ago

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
Indeed. Have we already forgotten about the RDF?
- coldtea 2y ago
  No, it was just always a meaningless term...
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - jimbokun 2y ago
    Was simply a phrase to acknowledge that Jobs was better at giving demos than anyone who ever lived.
dijit 2y ago
You can claim Apple is dishonest for a few reasons. 1) Graphs often are unannotatted. 2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path). 3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt. However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy. The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them. *EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
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- Brybry 2y ago
  "This thing is incredible," Jobs said. "It's the first supercomputer on a chip.... We think it's going to set the industry on fire." "The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III" - Steve Jobs (1999) [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/ https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
  - dijit 2y ago
    Thats cool, but literally last millennium. And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium. What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue- EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-just-carefully-select-its-truths/ https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju...; it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
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mort96 2y ago
Interesting, by what benchmark did you compare the G4 and the P3? I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.
- dblohm7 2y ago
  I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or SSE on Intel.
  - 0x457 2y ago
    Ah so the way Intel advertises their chips. Got it.
    - mort96 2y ago
      Yeah, and we rightfully criticize Intel for the same and we distrust their benchmarks
mc32 2y ago
Didn’t he have to use two PPC procs to get the equivalent perf you’d get on a P3? Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz! But Steve that’s two procs vs one! I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.
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leptons 2y ago
Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk", but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's, but that was their marketing angle from the 1990's.
- galad87 2y ago
  From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/ https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export the G4 to many countries due to its “supercomputer” classification by the US government.
  - m000 2y ago
    It seems that US government was buying too much into tech hypes at the turn of the millenium. Around the same period PS2 exports were also restricted [1]. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      The PS2 was used in supercomputing clusters.
- georgespencer 2y ago
  > Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk" It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1]. > but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.) The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer. You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance. This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context. This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3] > Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!). The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second. Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade? [^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.... [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/media/File:Supercomputers-history.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med... [^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/17/g4.ban.idg/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c... [^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance
brokencode 2y ago
Have any examples from the past decade? Especially in the context of how exaggerated the claims are from PC and Android brands they are competing with?
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- lynndotpy 2y ago
  Apple recently claimed that RAM in their Macbooks is equivalent to 2x the RAM in any other machine, in defense of the 8GB starting point. In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    > The secret is heavy reliance on swap You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
    - ethanwillis 2y ago
      How convenient :)
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - monsieurbanana 2y ago
      Regardless of what you can't tell, he's absolutely right regarding Apple's claims: saying that a 8gb mac is as good as a 16gb non-mac is laughable.
      - dmitrygr 2y ago
        That was never said. They said 8gb mac is similar to a 16gb non-Mac
windowsrookie 2y ago
While certainly misleading, there were situations where the G4 was incredibly fast for the time. I remember being able to edit Video in iMove on a 12" G4 Laptop. At that time there was no equivalent x86 machine.
jmull 2y ago
If you have to go back 20+ years for an example…
n9 2y ago
Worked in an engineering lab at the time of the G4 introduction and I can contest that the G4 was a very, very fast CPU for scientific workloads. Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.) A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench. Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
- ajross 2y ago
  It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists. There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86, though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from stale links), and the reality distortion field did the rest.
- seec 2y ago
  Funny you mention that machine I still have one of those laying around. It was a very cool machine indeed with a very capable graphics card but that's about it. It did some things better/faster than a Pentium III PC but only if you went for the bottom of the barrel unit and crippled the software support (MMX just like another reply mentioned). On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out). They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better. Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency). Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...

Aurornis 2y ago

> ME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. Okay, but your example was about battery life: > LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1] And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life. Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090 comparison was completely wrong and designed to be misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-nvidia/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-... This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.

vel0city 2y ago
You're right, its not 19 hours claimed. It was more than even that. > HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
- seaal 2y ago
  the absurdness was difference in claimed battery life vs actual battery life. 19 vs 2 is more absurd than 22.5 vs 12 > Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively. Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.

moogly 2y ago

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. I guess you weren't around during the PowerPC days... Because that's a laughable statement.

imwillofficial 2y ago
All I remember is tanks in the commercials. We need more tanks in commercials.
oblio 2y ago
I have no idea who's down voting you. They were lying through their teeth about CPU performance back then. A PC half the price was smoking their top of the line stuff.
- seec 2y ago
  That's funny you say that, because this is precisely the time, I started buying Macs (I got a Pismo PowerBook G3 gifted and then bought an iBook G4). And my experience was that for sure, if you put as much money into a PC than in a Mac you would get MUCH better performance. What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut choice. As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that impressive. Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference. And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall story. They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't that performant in the real world. And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient game) worse than a cheapo PC.

syncsynchalt 2y ago

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results. Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).

moooo99 2y ago

They are pretty honest when it comes to battery life claims, they’re less honest when it comes to benchmark graphs

underlogic 2y ago
I don't think less honest covers it and can't believe anything their marketing says after the 3090 claims. Maybe it's true, maybe not. We'll see from the reviews. Well assuming the reviewers weren't paid off with an "evaluation unit".

bvrmn 2y ago

BTW I get 19 hours from DELL XPS and Latitude. It's Linux with custom DE and Vim as IDE though.

amarka 2y ago
I get about 21 hours from mine, it's running Windows but powered off.
bee_rider 2y ago
This is why Apple can be slightly more honest about their battery specs, they don’t have the OS working against them. Unfortunately most DELLs XPS will be running Windows, so it is still misleading to provide specs based on what the hardware could do if not sabotaged.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I wonder if it’s like webpages. The numbers are calculated before marketing adds the crapware and ruins all of your hard work.
wklm 2y ago
can you share more details about your setup?
- bvrmn 2y ago
  Archlinux, mitigations (spectre alike) off, X11, OpenBox, bmpanel with only CPU/IO indicator. Light theme everywhere. Opera in power save mode. `powertop --auto-tune` and `echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo` Current laptop is Latitude 7390.
  - ribit 2y ago
    Right, so you are disabling all performance features and effectively turning your CPU into a low–end low–power SKU. Of course you’d get better battery life. It’s not the same thing though.

izacus 2y ago

> LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. For literal YEARS, Apple battery life claims were a running joke on how inaccurate and overinflated they were.

hinkley 2y ago
I’ve never known a time when Dell, IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Alien, weren’t lying through their teeth about battery times. What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I’ve been using their laptops since the last G4 which is twenty years. They’ve always been substantially more accurate about battery times.
- ruszki 2y ago
  The problem with arguing about battery life this way is that it's highly dependent on usage patterns. For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop, which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours. But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a useless metric for me, because all of them are shit. But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run several "micro"services at once, have constant internet transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half hours.
  - lukevp 2y ago
    You should try a MacBook Pro someday. It would still last all day with that workload. I had an XPS at work and it would last 1.5 hrs. My Apple laptop with the same workload lasts 6-8 hours easily. I never undocked the dell because of the performance issues. I undock the mac all the time because I can trust it to last.
    - 2y ago

bee_rider 2y ago

Controlling the OS is probably a big help there. At least, I saw lots of complaints about my zenbook model’s battery not hitting the spec. It was easy to hit or exceed it in Linux, but you have to tell it not to randomly spin up the CPU.

hinkley 2y ago
I had to work my ass off on my Fujitsu Lifebook to get 90% of the estimate, even on Linux. I even worked on a kernel patch for the Transmeta CPU, based on unexploited settings in the CPU documentation, but it came to no or negligible difference in power draw, which I suppose is why Linus didn’t do it in the first place.

nabakin 2y ago

Maybe for battery life, but definitely not when it comes to CPU/GPU performance. Tbf, no chip company is, but Apple is particularly egregious. Their charts assume best case multi-core performance when users rarely ever use all cores at once. They'd have you thinking it's the equivalent of a 3090 or that you get double the frames you did before when the reality is more like 10% gains.

dylan604 2y ago

Yeah, the assumption seems to be that using less battery by one component means that the power will just magically go unused. As with everything else in life, as soon as something stops using a resource something else fills the vacuum to take advantage of the resource.

treflop 2y ago

Apple is always honest but they know how to make you believe something that isn’t true.

bmitc 2y ago

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. In nearly every single release, their claims are well above actual performance.