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Jumping from x86 to arm may be worth it just because of how little power it needs. Perhaps you'd like a laptop where the fan never [*] turns on enough to be aud

Jumping from x86 to arm may be worth it just because of how little power it needs. Perhaps you'd like a laptop where the fan never [*] turns on enough to be audible and with 20 hours battery life? They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models. Do get one with 32 Gb ram if you can. You never know what you'll want to use it for next year. [*] Of course, if you compile/run renders etc you may get to hear the fan and it won't last 20 hours.

layer8 2y ago
The Lunar Lake laptops have reduced the power efficiency gap by a lot.
- nottorp 2y ago
  CPU wise or whole system wise? You can play some pretty taxing x86 3d games on my M3 pro laptops, in spite of the two layers of emulation. Those Lunar Lake laptops would need a GPU for that wouldn't they? Have they in the Wintel world figured out why Apple trackpads can actually act like a mouse replacement yet?
  - 7speter 2y ago
    The Lunar Lake SoC has a few (4 iirc) Battlemage GPU cores.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Whole-system wise (they roughly doubled the battery life over the previous generation [0]), and the Intel SoCs have reasonably powerful integrated GPUs. I’m not a laptop user myself and don’t consider even Apple trackpads (I actually own one of their desktop trackpads) anywhere close to a viable mouse replacement, so no further comment on that. [0] e.g. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/first-intel-lunar-lake-laptop-test-shows-almost-24-hour-battery-life https://www.extremetech.com/computing/first-intel-lunar-lake...
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Well you clearly can't play first person shooters even on Apple's trackpads, but every time I switch to an x86 one the control is more ... approximate. On my apple laptops i've succesfully played stuff like Minecraft or Path of Exile without a physical mouse. And never missed a mouse while doing software development. > reasonably powerful integrated GPUs. Path of Exile is anything but reasonable to the GPU. And on an older M2 mac mini I was lucky to get 20-25 fps. However, the M3 pro on my laptop can mostly run it at 60, to my complete astonishment. Especially considering it's a windows application that is ran by x86 wine that is translated to arm by rosetta 2...
ksec 2y ago
>They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models. I actually have one with my previous company and they are still not as good. New Scissors has a key travel distance of 1mm instead of 1.5mm, and trackpad is too large that causes false positive compare to zero on my MacBook 2015. Was rather hoping Apple to walk back these two thing by the time I get a new MacBook for myself. But looks like not.
- nottorp 2y ago
  Hmm that's probably because you do a direct comparison to the 2015. I made the mistake of getting an emoji keyboard model in like 2019 and this new M3 Pro felt like I could breathe again :)

layer8 2y ago

The Lunar Lake laptops have reduced the power efficiency gap by a lot.

nottorp 2y ago
CPU wise or whole system wise? You can play some pretty taxing x86 3d games on my M3 pro laptops, in spite of the two layers of emulation. Those Lunar Lake laptops would need a GPU for that wouldn't they? Have they in the Wintel world figured out why Apple trackpads can actually act like a mouse replacement yet?
- 7speter 2y ago
  The Lunar Lake SoC has a few (4 iirc) Battlemage GPU cores.
- layer8 2y ago
  Whole-system wise (they roughly doubled the battery life over the previous generation [0]), and the Intel SoCs have reasonably powerful integrated GPUs. I’m not a laptop user myself and don’t consider even Apple trackpads (I actually own one of their desktop trackpads) anywhere close to a viable mouse replacement, so no further comment on that. [0] e.g. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/first-intel-lunar-lake-laptop-test-shows-almost-24-hour-battery-life https://www.extremetech.com/computing/first-intel-lunar-lake...
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Well you clearly can't play first person shooters even on Apple's trackpads, but every time I switch to an x86 one the control is more ... approximate. On my apple laptops i've succesfully played stuff like Minecraft or Path of Exile without a physical mouse. And never missed a mouse while doing software development. > reasonably powerful integrated GPUs. Path of Exile is anything but reasonable to the GPU. And on an older M2 mac mini I was lucky to get 20-25 fps. However, the M3 pro on my laptop can mostly run it at 60, to my complete astonishment. Especially considering it's a windows application that is ran by x86 wine that is translated to arm by rosetta 2...

ksec 2y ago

>They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models. I actually have one with my previous company and they are still not as good. New Scissors has a key travel distance of 1mm instead of 1.5mm, and trackpad is too large that causes false positive compare to zero on my MacBook 2015. Was rather hoping Apple to walk back these two thing by the time I get a new MacBook for myself. But looks like not.

nottorp 2y ago
Hmm that's probably because you do a direct comparison to the 2015. I made the mistake of getting an emoji keyboard model in like 2019 and this new M3 Pro felt like I could breathe again :)