4 ms·

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

by random3 6mo ago

EvanAnderson 6mo ago
I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age". The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.) I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines. Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person. I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
- QuiEgo 6mo ago
  There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model. I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
  - tavavex 6mo ago
    What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market. There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start manufacturing components more easily and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer players on the market than we have now, in addition to a complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any) and what prices you will pay for any of these things. Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the availability of all these individual components is putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one manufacturers can reasonably charge you.
    - QuiEgo 6mo ago
      The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.
      - tavavex 6mo ago
        That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.
        QuiEgo 6mo ago
        I'm thinking of this like car radios. Most cars used to have this standard called DIN to put the radio in. Most cars today don't have DIN mounts anymore. We've gotten way nicer, bigger touch screens in our infotainment now since cars are not locked into one form factor. On the other hand, it sucks in some ways because vendor lock in. I hope we at least get a tradeoff like that - that there will be something in return for it. There are systems like the NUC but if I want a super-high-end 5090 and top-end CPU, all of the options to cool them feel like... well, something kluged together from whatever parts I can find, not something that's designed as a total system. Maybe we'll get some interesting designs out of this.
        EvanAnderson 6mo ago
        I'm afraid the acceptance (and, more troubling, the seeming desire on the part of technical people who I see as misguided) of mobile computers in the smart phone form factor to be locked down and hostile to their owners has moved the Overton window on personal computers being equally owner-hostile. The bucket-of-parts PC ecosystem is less susceptible to an effort to lock down the platform and create walled gardens. If that market goes away it gets easier to turn all of our personal computers into simply computer-shaped devices (like Chromebooks and iPads). I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc. I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too. I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous. I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals. I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.
Aurornis 6mo ago
Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world. We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.
- charcircuit 6mo ago
  Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.
  - limagnolia 6mo ago
    Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
- addaon 6mo ago
  Two different populations — those interested in computing, and those interested in computers.
- hn_acc1 6mo ago
  They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want. Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".
  - josephg 6mo ago
    They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines. They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.
GeoAtreides 6mo ago
but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  > As cheap as it was a couple of years ago. I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
  - underlipton 6mo ago
    You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
- cmxch 6mo ago
  Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive. Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD. They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
- random3 6mo ago
  x86 going away wouldn't be surprising. Ignoring David Patterson was a mistake to begin with.
  - nine_k 6mo ago
leptons 6mo ago
8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a budget laptop. It's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as "amazing" as it could be.
- faust201 6mo ago
  The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player). Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing. Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)
  - underlipton 6mo ago
    >(Same like getting rid of awful flash player). I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case. Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
    - alsetmusic 6mo ago
      Flash was a dumpster fire on MacOS. Apple probably would have supported it on the iPhone if Adobe had stopped it from crashing apps and made it performant on Apple's primary platform at the time (the Mac). I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.
      - underlipton 6mo ago
        All the other browsers managed it fine. That sounds like a Safari problem. Which would be totally in line with Apple's modus operandi.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

by random3 6mo ago

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age". The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.) I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines. Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person. I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.

QuiEgo 6mo ago
There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model. I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
- tavavex 6mo ago
  What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market. There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start manufacturing components more easily and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer players on the market than we have now, in addition to a complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any) and what prices you will pay for any of these things. Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the availability of all these individual components is putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one manufacturers can reasonably charge you.
  - QuiEgo 6mo ago
    The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.
    - tavavex 6mo ago
      That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.
      - QuiEgo 6mo ago
        I'm thinking of this like car radios. Most cars used to have this standard called DIN to put the radio in. Most cars today don't have DIN mounts anymore. We've gotten way nicer, bigger touch screens in our infotainment now since cars are not locked into one form factor. On the other hand, it sucks in some ways because vendor lock in. I hope we at least get a tradeoff like that - that there will be something in return for it. There are systems like the NUC but if I want a super-high-end 5090 and top-end CPU, all of the options to cool them feel like... well, something kluged together from whatever parts I can find, not something that's designed as a total system. Maybe we'll get some interesting designs out of this.
      - EvanAnderson 6mo ago
        I'm afraid the acceptance (and, more troubling, the seeming desire on the part of technical people who I see as misguided) of mobile computers in the smart phone form factor to be locked down and hostile to their owners has moved the Overton window on personal computers being equally owner-hostile. The bucket-of-parts PC ecosystem is less susceptible to an effort to lock down the platform and create walled gardens. If that market goes away it gets easier to turn all of our personal computers into simply computer-shaped devices (like Chromebooks and iPads). I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc. I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too. I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous. I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals. I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.

Aurornis 6mo ago

Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world. We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.

charcircuit 6mo ago
Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.
- limagnolia 6mo ago
  Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
addaon 6mo ago
Two different populations — those interested in computing, and those interested in computers.
hn_acc1 6mo ago
They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want. Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".
- josephg 6mo ago
  They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines. They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.

GeoAtreides 6mo ago

but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

joe_mamba 6mo ago
> As cheap as it was a couple of years ago. I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
- underlipton 6mo ago
  You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
cmxch 6mo ago
Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive. Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD. They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
random3 6mo ago
x86 going away wouldn't be surprising. Ignoring David Patterson was a mistake to begin with.
- nine_k 6mo ago

leptons 6mo ago

8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a budget laptop. It's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as "amazing" as it could be.

faust201 6mo ago
The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player). Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing. Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)
- underlipton 6mo ago
  >(Same like getting rid of awful flash player). I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case. Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    Flash was a dumpster fire on MacOS. Apple probably would have supported it on the iPhone if Adobe had stopped it from crashing apps and made it performant on Apple's primary platform at the time (the Mac). I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.
    - underlipton 6mo ago
      All the other browsers managed it fine. That sounds like a Safari problem. Which would be totally in line with Apple's modus operandi.