8 ms·

Genuine question, when people talk about apple silicon being fast, is the comparison to windows intel laptops, or Mac intel architecture? Because, when running

• newsclues 8mo ago
  Power management with Mac’s is the big benefit, imo. It’s all about the perf per watt.
• cj 8mo ago
  For me it’s things like boot speed. How long does it take to restart the computer. To log out, and log back in with all my apps opening. Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic functions. (I don’t have real data points) Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and always responsive. No idea how that compares to Linux.
  • nottorp 8mo ago
    Hmm? Why do you restart your computer often enough to notice? Even Windows (or at least my install that doesn't have any crap besides visual studio on it) can run for weeks these days...
    • maccard 8mo ago
      My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to sleep and just run its battery to 0. My work PC will decide to not idle and will spin up fans arbitrarily in the evenings so I shut it down when I’m not using it.
      • nottorp 8mo ago
        > My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to sleep and just run its battery to 0. That reminds me that if Apple annoys me enough to switch back to linux at my main OS it will hurt on laptops :(
  • eru 8mo ago
    Well, completely rebooting is a lot slower on my Macs than on my Linux. But I'm running a fairly slim Archlinux install without a desktop environment or anything like that. (It's just XMonad as a window manager.)
    • indemnity 8mo ago
      What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.
  • nerdsniper 8mo ago
    Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.
    • spockz 8mo ago
      It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in. However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app, immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open Firefox it opens instantly. Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded. On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly. Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.
  • throwa356262 8mo ago
    Some of that can be attributed to faster IO. Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered. Why? I have no idea.
    • ahepp 8mo ago
      My guess would be that ARM Chromebooks might run substantially more cut-down firmware? While intel might need a more full-fat EFI stack? But I haven't used either and am just speculating.
  • jghn 8mo ago
    > For me it’s things like boot speed This is a metric I never really understood. how often are people booting? The only time I ever reboot a machine is if I have to. For instance the laptop I'm on right now has an uptime of just under 100 days.
    • maccard 8mo ago
      My Mac - couldn’t tell you, I just close the lid. My work laptop? Probably every day, as it makes its own mind up what it does when you close the lid. Even the “shut down” button in the start menu often restarts the machine in win 11. My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for things like Docker to decide that they’ve actually started up.
    • n8cpdx 8mo ago
      Back in the bad old days of Intel Macs, I had a full system crash just as I was about to get up to give a presentation in class. It rebooted and got to desktop, restoring all my open windows and app state, before I got to the podium (it was a very small room). The Mac OS itself seems to be relatively fast to boot, the desktop environment does a good job recovering from failures, and now the underlying hardware is screaming fast. I should never have to reboot, but in the rare instances when it happens, being fast can be a difference maker.
• smw 8mo ago
  Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop pcs.
  • eru 8mo ago
    Of course, it's only competitive for short bursts of serious CPU work. The thermal limits do kick in pretty quickly. (I love my MacBook Air, but it does have its limits.)
    • nerdsniper 8mo ago
      I looked into this for the M1 MBA and it had the exact same performance at full load as the MBP...for 7 minutes. Then the thermal throttling hits and it slows down. I'm not sure what the time limit is for newer models. Regardless, the MBA's aren't offered with Pro/Ultra chips, which I desire (and would thermally throttle much sooner than 7 minutes). My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is entirely based on whether they do anything that will load the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a lot. 0: https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control
      • eru 8mo ago
        I guess the details depend on how warm it is in your room, and whether your MacBook Air sits directly under a fan.
      • testing22321 8mo ago
        I edit tons of raw images and 4K video like it’s going out of style. My used M1 mba is the fastest computer I’ve ever used. If a video render is going to take more than 7 minutes I walk away or just do something in another app anyway. The difference of a few mini means nothing.
      • giantrobot 8mo ago
• throwa356262 8mo ago
  First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair. Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch of design and manufacturing choices. But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same hardware.
  • rahkiin 8mo ago
    My windows with corporate crap is sometimes 2000x slower than without corporate crap. And consistently 10x slower than an M3
    • PaulHoule 8mo ago
      I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now: beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… Reminds me of the bad old days of Win XP.
      • nerdsniper 8mo ago
        How much RAM do you have? That seems to be the main thing that slows down my MacBooks (original launch-day 16GB M1 MBP and 32 GB M2 Pro). The M1 CPU is finally starting to show its age for some things, but the M2 Pro is really only RAM limited in perceived speed for me.
      • drob518 8mo ago
        RAM. You must have 16 GB or more. And for serious work now, I’m looking at 32 GB or more.
        • PaulHoule 8mo ago
          Mine has 48GB.
        • leptons 8mo ago
          I haven't had a laptop with less than 32GB of RAM in about 15 years. RAM is extremely useful for some workloads.
• nerdsniper 8mo ago
  I use pretty much all platforms and architectures as my "daily drivers" - x64, Apple Silicon, and ARM Cortex, with various mixtures of Linux/Mac/Windows. When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in performance, and battery life is more variable now. Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU, GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher memory bandwidth/lower latency. I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's competitive in the latest generation.
  • deleted 8mo ago
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  • Philip-J-Fry 8mo ago
    This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever. My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery. I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.
• rngfnby 8mo ago
  New Mac arm user here. Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb). Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba mount through our corporate VPN. - Much faster than my intel Mac - Faster than my Windows - Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but with my current job I no longer get to use them much for desktop (unfortunately). Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just sleeps/wakes up with no problems. The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery, decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer keypress)
  • bstar77 8mo ago
    Part of it is that the data pipelines in the Mac are far more efficient with its soldered memory and enhanced buses. You would have to use something like Halo Strix on the PC side see similar performance upticks at a somewhat affordable price bracket. Things like Samba/VPN mounting should not matter much (unless your mac network interface is significantly better), but you might see a general snappiness improvement. Heavy compute tasks will be a give and take with modern PC hardware, but Apple is still the king of efficiency. I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with virtually no compromises.
• qoez 8mo ago
  I love apple and mainly use one for personal use, but apple users consistently overrate how fast their machines are. I used to see sentiment like "how will nvidia ever catch up with apples unified silicon approach" a few years ago. But if you just try nvidia vs apple and compare on a per dollar level, nvidia is so obviously the winner.
  • maccard 8mo ago
    For day to day use, my base spec M1 MacBook Pro is snappier than my i9 desktop with 128GB of ram and a 4090.
• dangus 8mo ago
  I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop review coverage before asking questions like this. There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions. Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks. Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia. Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.
• lrem 8mo ago
  You can notice that memory bandwidth advantage even in workloads like photo editing and code compilation. That and the performance cores reserved for foreground compute, on top of the usual "Linux sucks at swap" (was it fixed? I haven't enabled swap on my Linux machines for ages by now), does make a day-to-day difference in my usage.
• irae 8mo ago
  I've used Linux as a daily driver for 6 months and I am now back to my M1 Max for the past month. I didn't find any reply mentioning the easy of use, benefits and handy things the mac does and Linux won't. Spotlight, Photos app with all the face recognition and general image index, contact sync, etc. Takes ages to setup those on Linux and with macs everything just works with an Apple account. So I wonder if Linux had to do all this background stuff, if it would be able to run smoothly as Macs run this days. For context: I was running Linux for 6 months for the first time in 10 years (which I was daily driving macs). My M1 Max still beats my full tower gaming PC, which I was using linux at. I've used Windows and Linux before, and Windows for gaming too. My Linux setup was very snappy without any corporate stuff. But my office was getting warm because of the PC. My M1 barely turn on the fans, even with large DB migrations and other heavy operation during software development.
• bluedino 8mo ago
  Somehow my 2011 MacBook Pro was the fastest laptop I had ever used. After I put an SSD in it, that is. I wonder what my Apple silicon laptop is even doing sometimes.
• testdelacc1 8mo ago
  I haven’t used a laptop other than a mac in 10 years. I remember being extremely frustrated with the Intel macs. What I hated most was getting into video meetings, which would make the Intel CPU sound like a 747 taxiing. The switch from a top spec, new Intel Mac to a base model M1 Macbook Air was like a breath of fresh air. I still use that 5 year old laptop happily because it was such a leap forward in performance. I dont recall ever being happy with a 5 year old device.
• ahepp 8mo ago
  I think you're bringing up a great question here. If you ask a random person on the street "is your laptop fast", the answer probably has more to do with what software that person is running, than what hardware. My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid and the battery lasts forever.