I’m an Apple fan and let me roll my eyes. This is nonsense.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume Apple’s latest laptops have thoroughly wiped the floor against PCs.
If that’s the case, Apple’s computers are in a completely different class. You now have ARM machines that run macOS and x86 machines that run any other operating system.
Thus, if you’re looking for an x86 machine, you’re not buying an Apple product.
This isn’t some inconvenient truth. If you include macs in a PC review… there isn’t any point. You’d be comparing apples with oranges.
Yes. I wrote this entire comment to make that joke. :)
Your reasoning is starting with the wrong premise. As if people are looking for x86 or ARM machines.
I would rather say people are in the market for something to write their thesis on, write some code or do creative work. MacBooks and Windows/Intel laptops can do this both. There is no apples to oranges comparison.
The separation of MacBooks and Windows/Intel laptops based on a chipset or OS is completely arbitrary and opinionated.
> The separation of MacBooks and Windows/Intel laptops based on a chipset or OS is completely arbitrary and opinionated.
There's a reasonable line to draw between consumer and professional needs, but this isn't it. The average person probably won't notice the difference when they're web browsing or futzing in Photoshop, but they're definitely going to notice when none of their Steam games install and the program their boss sent them won't run.
The average laptop customer obviously isn't going to look for a specific ISA. However, they're definitely going to notice when those old Flash games won't boot, their code from 2 years ago doesn't compile or their Photoshop plugins break when switching Macs. That's the Apple Silicon problem.
It is literally a different class, and not a disadvantage because there are both advantages and disadvantages.
But when deciding, the decision between an XPS, X1, and Surface, is different from the decision between a Surface, Mac, and Chromebook.
They all have superficially overlapping facilities, they can all display web pages, they can all "run apps", but in fact they are 3 entirely distinct platforms, and you have to know which platform you want, or which platform will serve your needs, as an entirely seperate and distinct question before thequestion of different pieces of hardware within that platform.
Those different platforms, are literally exactly different classes.
It depends upon your target market. For many people, an Apple computer is a PC. They run the same, or very similar, applications to get the same job done. Very few computer users are going to care if that PC is based upon ARM or x86. The only reason why most computer users care about the operating system is due to application support, familiarity of the user interface, or perceived reliability.
For various reasons, I am firmly in the x86 camp. On the other hand, there is a very good reason to compare apples to oranges: for a good number of people a fruit is a fruit, but the flavour still matters.
Then there are the oddballs who used to install oranges into apples to get the best of both worlds. (Historical tid-bit, Orange Micro used to make PC compatibility cards for Macintosh computers.)
Exactly. My brother was recently shopping for two devices, and he considered Mac laptops, iPads, Windows laptops, Windows tablets, and Chromebooks. For him, it was just a question of what would allow his family to (1) watch TV, (2), surf the web, (3) do email, and (4) back up other devices. In the end he got one iPad and one MBA, though he seriously considered Windows alternatives.
I am just going to add that Apple computers are fine for many people who are looking to create, rather than to consume and communicate. It has the industry standard office productivity suite, graphics design and publishing software, software development tools, and much more. The reason why I bring this up is because we sometimes have the tendency to paint Apple products as having very little value outside of casual/home uses. The reality is that they are actually fairly powerful tools. They won't fill every niche as tools, but that has more to do with the size of the user base in various markets.
I'm not buying an ARM laptop or an x86 laptop, I'm buying a laptop that lets me get work done. Both types do the work I need, the Apple one currently does it nicer at a good price point. If the x86 laptops start doing it better than I'd pick one of those.
This is the correct approach. You buy what gives the best value for money and allows you to run the software you need. Fan boyism is not universal, most people outside tech just buy what they need regardless whose cpu is inside.
This means that you will need another comparison, if any. For other people it totally makes sense to restrict the comparison to products where you can install the operating system you want.
> You now have ARM machines that run macOS and x86 machines that run any other operating system.
Not necessarily. You can run Linux on Apple Silicon today. Asahi is far from complete, missing lots of drivers and with other sharp corners, but it's been a better experience than I've had with most x86 laptops I've tried. What works works, the machine is stable, fast (even for some graphical applications despite the lack of GPU drivers!) and the battery life is great.
Apparently you can run some form of BSD on it as well but I have no idea how far the support is.
> Thus, if you’re looking for an x86 machine, you’re not buying an Apple product.
Perhaps, but I don't think a lot of people out there actually care about the underlying architecture unless they're developing architecture-specific stuff.
Cool? I mean sure, if when you're picking out a computer it's because you're going to run some variant of Linux/BSD on it then yeah, that's relevant. Or if you have specific Software needs that only run on Windows, macOS, or Linux then that's the decision made. But if you're just looking for a general purpose computer then they're absolutely competitors since the list of popular software that's macos/windows exclusive is small.
And if the argument is "well if you don't have high-performance needs and you're just <pejorative about what people use computers for> then why does it matter" the answer is because the battery life is incredible and the thing is unbelievably snappy and responsive.
Didn’t know that “how fast it is and how long I can use it” weren’t even worth talking about with a computer. Should I choose my laptop based on how many USB ports it has? Maybe how many rgb lights it comes with?
Oh definitely USB ports is more important than fan noise. About on part with battery life.
For me though, the primary thing I look for is whether or not I can do with it what I want. More specifically, whether the company that made it is actively trying to prevent me from doing that.
I care about that stuff most of all. I realize I am one of a very few people though. :)
Are you expecting John Gruber to be rational and impartial talking about Apple? He's being the biggest shill the Internet has ever known, for a decade. This "journalist" is a clown.
Sometimes they are not even available from Apple at launch.
I found it pretty ridiculous that at Apple's most recent event they announced a product (the M2) that not only wasn't available for purchase, but that couldn't even be pre-ordered.
This is perhaps ridiculous but not at all uncommon. iPhones are never available for order at the events where they are announced. Sometimes computers are, but not ones in high demand. A slight delay makes sense for fairness (everyone knows when they’ll be available for order and can try simultaneously), but this is the first time I can remember them saying “next month” as the time when they’d be available and ready for preorder.
The Apple.com e-commerce website allows much more configuration and customization options, ie: offering more colors and memory / disk size configurations, engraving, etc. The experience on the apple website is really excellent.
This was explained well by early reviewers: the benchmarks are too different to compare at this point and a bit immature for Apples new architecture.
Some of the benchmarks only ran in Intel mode which puts Apple at an unfair disadvantage and might bias the results. Other benchmarks weren't designed for machines like the M1 Max and leave it well below 100% utilization even when natively compiled. A completely new cross platform benchmark is needed to do a proper comparison.
There are still some benchmarks on Ars comparing both architectures when applicable e.g when Intel launched the new CPUs and claimed they were faster than the M1 Ars ran the comparison to test that claim.
Is there any reason to think that the benchmarks, once improved to more accurately capture what the Apple Silicon chips do, will show it performing worse than they do now?
'Cause if they're only likely to give better results later on, that just supports TFA's thesis even more...
I don't think showing misleading numbers supports anything. It's not like there were no benchmarks comparing Intel and M1. There were plenty of those and it's pretty easy to find them. So we should have a sense of what these "broken benchmarks" indicate.
Showing a flawed misleading comparison for every laptop that comes out is redundant and misleading regardless of the direction.
While I don't like the phrasing in the article, I think the author is right that it is hypocritical of reviewers to exclude MacBooks from comparison. Especially for professional work as a dev, nothing ever comes close to the value proposition of the base MBP 14" model.
> nothing ever comes close to the value proposition of the base MBP 14" model.
Really? I bet you can buy a laptop for 1/10th the price that can do 90% of the same software dev tasks. The only thing the 14" does better is iOS development, which you don't have a choice of machines for anyways. I love a lot of things about the 14" Macbook Pro, but defending it's value proposition is something I can't really understand. It's a $2,000 laptop running the same OS as a $900 laptop, running the same git binary that you execute on a $35 Raspberry Pi. I don't see it.
> It's a $2,000 laptop running the same OS as a $900 laptop, running the same git binary that you execute on a $35 Raspberry Pi. I don't see it.
I suppose you're right if you do absolutely everything on the command line, but in terms of the GUI and GUI applications, there's a world of difference, and once you factor in the Apple ecosystem (so contacts and notes are automatically synched between my phone and my Macs, etc) and the speed and polish of programs like Safari and Numbers, the value proposition becomes quite different. Us Mac users could use our Mac systems as generic Unix/Linux boxes, but few of us actually do.
> I suppose you're right if you do absolutely everything on the command line, but in terms of the GUI and GUI applications, there's a world of difference,
Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains IDE work the same in Windows/Linux as in Macs. So I don't see the advantage of Mac here.
Neither of those are Mac applications. One is an Electron pile of ass and the other is a Java pile of ass.
See Xcode or Nova for examples of real Mac IDEs/editors.
But note that my post was not just talking about development tools. I get work done on my Macs, but I also handle finances, play games, study, write documents, and shitpost on HN. All of those things (with the exception of the "play games" part sometimes) I find more pleasant to do in the familiar environment of a Mac.
I sometimes have to code in Java for my work, and someone told me about a great Vim plugin for it (and also how to make plugin groups, that helps a lot). The only moment i leave the CLI nowadays are caused by Jenkins.
I think the only GUI i use is my browser, so Mac is a hard pass for me (also, while apple us keyboard is fine, the French one is utter shit)
But how does that $900 PC hold up over time compared to a Mac? In my personal experience, I get about 2-3 years out of a PC, and about 5 out of a Mac, which justifies the price tag for me.
I’m still using an original, generation 1 iPhone as a music player. Not only does it still work, but it has a better UI and the icons look different from each other.
Apple stuff in my experience breaks either in the first few months, or at least 5 years out of warranty (except for the thin keyboards, but I avoided those defective designs).
Hell, we've just ordered an M2 MBA to replace my wife's 2015 13" MBP—which is, for the most part, still running fine; we just want to make sure we're getting her a new one while that's still the case. Don't want to have it suddenly up and die one day.
And I've got her father's 2011 Mac Mini sitting in our TV cabinet running a Plex instance (plus a few other things, like a local internal-only web server). It needs a little fan sitting on top of it to keep it cool enough, but those cost about $10.
Yes, but that applies to pretty much every computer PC based devs use as well, there are much cheaper laptops than most of the "developer" target Dell laptops as well. Hell, I bet I can get an old 486 off eBay that could do most of the same tasks, by your rules.
Doing it in less time, or without needing to have a wall socket, etc matters, and has value.
Of course in terms of value proposition there's a question: that's why we're asking why it's not on the review sites being compared to other laptops. Otherwise we're stuck with "it benchmarks faster and lasts longer on battery" anecdata.
You can sit on a rickety stool bought for three buck while programming too but you want to be comfortable. Buying a MBP is about comfort too. Long life battery, super cool and silent performance. Nothing worse than when an Intel laptop fires the jet engine fans and heats up dramatically.
Gruber isn't always right, but he's right here. I use Macs and Thinkpads for work. My M1 Mac is by far the fastest and also has by far the best battery life and uses the fans the least often. x86 is way behind ARM right now.
I recently started a project with a client that shipped me a laptop. It's one of the new MBP's with an M1 Pro. Even with all the crapware this client loves to pile on these machines (standard enterprise MDM fare), this is still by far the fastest computer I've used. The fact that this thing is noticeably faster than my "main" work machine which has the same amount of ram, zero company crapware (oh how i love working for small and med sized corps) but an i7. The i7 machine is fast, chews through anything that I throw at it, but the M1 Pro is just faster, like noticeably faster all-around, not just under certain workloads.
I've thrown around the idea of dropping big money ($4.8k the way I specced it) on a Mac Studio with an M1 Max. Up until now the idea was silly considering I have a perfectly good Macbook Pro from work without any spyware that I get for free. But dammit this M1 loaner might have pushed me over the edge.
i have a mac studio it’s fine, i was underwhelmed after all the hype. i still spend too much time waiting on slow web apps like gmail and google docs. main value prop is driving up to 5 displays
I believe the main value proposition for most of its target market is its insane video and vfx rendering speed. I have a fully-optioned M1 Max MacBook Pro and a fully-optioned Mac Studio. I primarily use the Mac Studio to render projects that I prepare on the MBP. My Mac Studio has cumulatively saved me days of time I would have otherwise spent waiting for things to finish.
$4000 macbook $4000 mac studio what's the difference if you WFH, I'll take the extra ram and displays. I'm a web developer and build times are improved, especially while screen sharing over zoom (which is a hog), and chrome responsiveness is improved too just not as much as people said
I have a 14" M1 MBP from work. I've never purchased a Mac for personal use, but that's going to change when I can justify replacing my Thinkpad. They made an impressive machine while also taking away all of my hangups with the hardware (keyboard, ports, touchbar).
I have the 16inch and I have never heard it’s fan. Not even while doing some intense multitasking in a room at 30 degrees Celsius. If they had told me this was possible two years ago I would have laughed
There’s a wide segment of users (50-75% ??) that could simply use Chromebooks ( I buy then for my parents). People can use them easily. Switching to a Mac is not so easy, because EVERYTHING is different ( but everyone knows how to use a browser)
If you are a PC gamer by definition a Mac will not work for you.
For those of us with high end needs and can run on Macs (devs, etc) then of course the perf comparison is valid.
But everyone is not us (devs, etc)
This is a strange article. I think many review sites have split the reviews into best iPhone/best android and best Mac/best windows laptop as there is simply no point in trying to convert people from their religion.
To my original point, the one area Apple can’t (won’t) compete is on price. Not everyone needs an expensive super thin laptop. Some people can spend $500 and get exactly what they need in a laptop.
Apple seems to be reconsidering the exclusive targeting of the higher end of the market with the iPhone SE - I wonder if they may make a similar move with Macs at some point which would allow them to compete on price. Especially if Apple continues their emphasis on services/recurring revenue, I could see a future in which they sell a (relatively) inexpensive MacBook for the possibility of opening themselves up to a market of consumers who could pair that with the future equivalent of an iPhone SE and be happy Apple Music subscribers.
No, they're just different devices with some overlap. When searching for a laptop to buy, providing Apple MacBooks in the comparison would be about as useful as adding iPads or Chromebooks - it could work as "if you only care about X, check out our article on this other type of product", but that's it.
Apple's products mostly make sense within it's ecosystem. If you're not already there, there are a lot of hurdles and useless things.
As a lifelong Windows and Linux user (with a couple of years of iMac usage at school), i now have a work provided MacBook Pro. Almost every other week i discover something new about it that annoys me - be it Pages automatically saving in its own shitty proprietary format instead of the original, the impossibility to have separate scroll order between mouse and touchpad, that while it sleeps Bluetooth is still on thus tricking various devices to connect to it, that i have to run a keylogger to add custom shortcuts and remap some keys, that fullscreen apps go to a separate workspace so I can't switch between their windows, etc. etc. And there are extra annoyances due to the architecture change, like having to re/cross compile stuff manually (for my specific use case). And it can't run games.
As others said, it's apples to oranges. "Casual" users can usually barely handle the OS they know and use, what makes anyone think they can switch to a different one with different logic?
My (subjective and probably limited) experience as a sysadmin and security and platform engineer for the past 7-ish years has shown me that a large portion of users in highly technical roles (not usually the majority in a company) are issued Macbooks.
Especially in the cloud role that I currently occupy, it seems like MacOS hits that nice balance for most corporations of providing a powerful Unix userspace while being somewhat easy to use and very secure (especially compared to the default posture of most Linux desktop machines).
That being said, I can understand being annoyed with aspects of MacOS. I have a work issued Intel Mac and Dell XPS that I have running Arch and I much prefer my Linux machine. But I think that if MacOS wasn't an option most places wouldn't even have a Unix/Unix-like option for their employees' workstations.
Flag it. Flag every submarine ad on Hacker News. It'd be a boon for the site if it treated every positive article from companies with marketing budgets as astroturfing until proven otherwise. Same goes for political articles. And anyone caught at any time trying to game the system. Just blanket deleted for a set period of time. Offend again? Longer time. Third time? You're done. Forever.
The main page would only be cool projects and interesting tech news, instead of flame wars by confused people who think Apple and the rest of FAANG are a football teams. There's literally no downside.
Comments pointing it out are good. I'm replying to you though because this is the first time I've ever heard anyone say that not wanting to look at marketing/PR/astroturfing is censorship. Lots of people disagree about what is or isn't that stuff, but never that blocking it would be censorship. Interesting take, thanks for your contribution.
Interesting. I have a 12900HX laptop with 4 × 2T 980 Pro-s, upgradeable to 128G DDR5 RAM. It has a large bright 4K screen, mechanical keyboard with Cherry keys, and one PCIe v5 slot for next gen 15GB/s SSDs. It is cold and extremely quiet in normal work, gets about 5h battery life under Manjaro w/5.17 kernel. It compiles our clang projects 2-3x faster than 2022 MBP models, installs software faster than MBP users finish typing "brew install", and native Docker and general VM performance on BTRFS RAID10 is so much faster it's not even funny. I'm fine with not having XXX hours battery life which I don't need since I work at a desk, on a laptop with ridiculous amounts of telemetry which I cannot even fully control. To me, my laptop (MSI GT77) is by far the best laptop right now. Really don't get this focus on battery life that Apple peddles this year.
> Price & usecase wise your machine should be compared to a Mac Studio, no?
Also weight: over 7lbs, and it doesn't even look like that counts the power brick necessary to use the full performance of that machine. It's not a laptop by any reasonable definition; it's a luggable. It's desktop parts squeezed into a form factor that resembles a laptop until you put it next to a real human for scale.
3rd party GaN power brick is fine, not cheap (~$100) but works well at about 1/3 the size of the stock charger (which IS monstrous).
I think later this year we might see slightly smaller HX form factors with Legion 7i and others coming soon. I never really understood why extra 3-4 lbs is such a big deal, I do carry a lot of gear every day though (and squat fairly heavy), so it might be a question of habit. :-)
> I never really understood why extra 3-4 lbs is such a big deal,
I'm having a very hard time taking you seriously here. Do you really have trouble understanding why most people would prefer not to carry the weight of two laptops when they could carry the weight of one laptop instead?
I'm sure reviewers' "advertising partners" are none too happy to have another machine outperform their x86 machines so badly as to tacitly imply that no one should buy them. The reviewers need to pay their bills. It's no surprise they are going to take the Macbooks out of the comparison sheets even though, for all intents and purposes, they so the same thing as Windows laptops. There are way more of them than there are ARM laptops.
And yeah, I get it that in this crowd, there are many people that that need x86. But for the vast majority of consumers, all they need is a machine that can surf the web and open up spreadsheets.
> But for the vast majority of consumers, all they need is a machine that can surf the web and open up spreadsheets.
Okay, so why should they buy a $1,200 base model Macbook Air instead of a $200 Lenovo Chromebook? Better yet, why didn't Apple just let the iPad replace the Air if "all they need" is web browsing and office clients?
Because have you every actually used one of those cheap ass computers. They're absolute trash, the keyboard is wiggly, the trackpad feels awful, the screen is low res and can't handle sunlight, the wifi chip is cheap and unreliable, the speakers sound awful, the battery life is abysmal, you get no support, and it's frustratingly slow. I wouldn't wish anything you can buy at Bestbuy on my worst enemy.
If anything someone who is going to be using a laptop a lot but has modest actual computing needs is the perfect candidate for a laptop that prioritizes build quality.
Look, Apple isn't the only game in town when it comes to nice laptops, the Surface Book is really nice, but when you're comparing "computers I actually want to use for any extended period of time" $1200 isn't all that expensive.
> Look, Apple isn't the only game in town when it comes to nice laptops, the Surface Book is really nice, but when you're comparing "computers I actually want to use for any extended period of time" $1200 isn't all that expensive.
And that's the point. $1200 IS expensive to some people who are only using it for basic computing tasks.
Some people do know what they are getting. They don't care about all the QoL improvements in more expensive laptops as long as they can afford it.
> Better yet, why didn't Apple just let the iPad replace the Air if "all they need" is web browsing and office clients?
Well, they are. Remember apple's "what's a computer?" ads last year? And the higher end ipads cost more than the lowest priced macs.
They make different products for different use cases. Personally I do development on an macbook air, which is already so light I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven't forgotten it.
To be fair, the original author of the quoted article is probably doing most of the smoking of things. All Gruber did is restate it and add the obnoxious political snipe at the end.
Windows people, how much faster would a non-Windows machine have to be before you'd start to consider using something other than Windows? I know if the question were flipped and given to me as a Mac user, the answer would have to be something like "fast enough that the muscle memory and system knowledge I've gained from three decades of Mac use could be overcome by sheer system speed of the Windows machine," and that would have to be pretty damned fast. Given that it's pretty irrelevant to me to compare the two.
I would rather use a Linux machine but I have generally been using Windows due to the general lack of support for Linux. There are a variety of things Windows and Apple simply don't support, and the list of things Apple doesn't support is longer.
There are some old games I enjoy playing with friend and they simply don't run on a Mac, for example. So it doesn't matter how fast the Mac is, I can't alt-tab over to the game then alt-tab back to my terminal and do something real quick, I need an entirely separate Apple machine if I want the terminal to be "fast."
Speed is just not that useful to me, I want a general-purpose computer and it's fine if some features perform at 1/5th the speed, the computer is mostly idle anyway and while instant is obviously better versatility is the primary virtue I'm looking for.
> how much faster would a non-Windows machine have to be
Until Macs run games, it's a pointless comparison. If Steam did for Macs what they did for Linux, then we'd have something interesting to talk about. But a PC without games is about as attractive as... a Ferrari, I guess. If somebody handed me a free 200K$ sports car, I'd just sell it. It's useless for my lifestyle. A PC that can't play games is equally useless to me.
Steam exists on Mac, and while there are plenty of games that don't have Mac ports that I wish I could play (Stray being the most recent), there are still enough to keep me perpetually backlogged, and the limits are probably best for my wallet and productivity anyway.
Steam exists on macOS, but honestly it feels like a second class citizen to me. Lots of the games that used to work fine no longer work because they are 32-bit and are no longer supported on current macOS releases, which only support 64-bit binaries. We can argue back and forth all day about whether this is Apple’s fault or the developers’ fault, but a key giveaway to me is that Portal and Portal 2, which are (arguably at least) flagship games for Valve, have not have 64-but releases. I get that it’s not as simple as a recompile & release, but to my mind it’s a bit of a giveaway that macOS doesn’t seem to have enough gaming market share to force a re-release on 64-bit for all these games.
As a huge fan of the Portal games, I feel your pain. I really miss them. Unfortunately Valve doesn't really seem to be in the market of making actual games anymore, so we'll probably never see a 64-bit upgrade.
But like I said, I've still got other games to play. I've long ago made peace with the idea that I just can't play every game I want to play at any time on my Mac, and that's fine. Others will have a different opinion and that's fine too.
Steam exists on the mac and steam exists on linux. The need for linux ports is dwindling now that Steam has developed proton, a sort of rosetta that converts directx api calls into vulkan api calls, on linux
If the reason it doesn’t make sense to include the (faster, more power efficient) MacBooks in reviews is that windows users would have to see way higher value before they’d even consider switching… then shouldn’t that just be stated in the review? That the purpose of the review is to compare x86 laptops?
If a review is looking at hardware, and MacBooks are out there, shouldn’t they be included for the benefit of people who are actually trying to understand their purchase options?
Let me try restating my point: Windows users know how to be productive in Windows. How many of these people will be willing to give up that knowledge for a Mac that may be faster in terms of brute speed but with which they will, at least initially, have no idea how to be productive with?
Sit a person who's only ever used Windows their whole life in front of a Mac and ask them to find and launch a certain application. Once they realize there's no Start button they'll probably be completely lost.
Thanks, that’s helpful- and I agree with you that the time and energy required to learn a new OS is a big investment for users who are comfortable with what they have.
But, it sounds like you and I land on two different sides of this. Your point seems to be that other OS machines shouldn’t be included because of that significant entry barrier, and my point is that if the review is being presented as a comparison of the best hardware options, then it’s not accurate to eliminate MacOS machines on the basis of software. I’d sooner see reviews either (a) compare exclusively same-OS machines and say so, or (b) disclaim that users might face that bigger entry barrier, but show the comparison and leave the decision of whether learning a new OS would be worth it to the reader
Exactly. It is rare, not the norm. But Gruber rarely goes outside of Apple circle so he doesn't know any of these. I cant count how many times he got things factually wrong. ( And rarely correct himself )
I mean when certain things on PC were actually better, did Gruber ever mentions it as an inconvenient truth?
Those rare reviews included MacBook when it could run Bootcamp ( Windows ). From a comparative point of view at least that make sense. Buyer aren't looking for Hardware differences, if nerds want to pinpoint that with GB5 they would have known.
And it is not like these site completely ignore Apple products either. They are just done in a separate article.
> I mean when certain things on PC were actually better, did Gruber ever mentions it as an inconvenient truth?
...Why would he? There are hundreds of tech publications and bloggers who will cheerfully talk about why Windows computers are better than Macs, and have been basically since the release of Windows 1.0.
He's calling this "an inconvenient truth" because he's seeing a trend among supposedly cross-platform reviews that say the Apple Silicon-based computers are faster than any of the Intel computers being reviewed......and then just say "but the Intel one is the best!" without justifying that with any explanation about how obviously anyone who's looking to do real work needs a Windows computer or something.
He is not smoking something but remembering a time of Apple just right after Jobs left the first time when after macs got expansion slots they started comparing macs to PCs.
Yes, old enough to remember that and expanding Performa macs for more performance.
I mean, here's an inconvenient truth: the software I use on a daily basis doesn't work on ARM. The software I develop at work doesn't run on ARM.
If there was a laptop that could replace my T460s with 20 hours of battery life, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, an x86 laptop with 4 hours of battery life is always going to be more productive than an ARM Macbook/Raspberry Pi for my purposes. I don't think that's denial, it's just the transactional cost of Apple continuing to cut people out of their ecosystem. That's a perfectly fine decision for them to make, but if you can't argue that Apple Silicon will work for everybody, you're defending a moot point. They could make a laptop with 100 hours of battery life, but if it can't run my Docker containers for work, then it can't replace what I have already.
Basically everything I've tried has worked on my Apple Silicon Mac, including x86_64 Docker containers using Docker Desktop. I'm sure there are applications that don't work, but I've yet to run into one first hand and I'm a software dev.
We lost several weeks for about 10 new devs at my company who started in May/June because Apple only sells M1 now, so that’s what the new devs got, but all the old devs have x86. Poetry+geospatial libs+other stuff didn’t work at all and the new devs struggled to fix it because while they may have had 5, 10, 20 years of software experience, they didn’t know all our stack and didn’t know M1. The remote environment made debugging very slow.
In retrospect we probably should have forced all devs to switch to M1 at once and upgraded everyone’s laptop, but we saw all these posts about how everything works on M1 and that just wasn’t the case at all in our experience.
It sounds like you ought to be gotten at least one experienced team member an M1 laptop, and asked them to spend a 2-3 days making sure that you software runs smoothly on it.
Our software at work didn't work out of the box on M1, but fixing it was fairly trivial and mostly involved upgrading library versions (although we use Node not Python which admittedly tends to be better at portability). But someone completely new to the codebase definitely isn't the person to be fixing these issues.
I mean, there is certainly a class of issue that can be fixed on ARM, you're not incorrect there. Rosetta is not a panacea though, and ARM will not be there to save you when you're trying to spin up a half dozen Docker containers to run your testing framework locally. There are genuinely some issues on M1 that are too big to bikeshed, most of which unfortunately come down to software compatibility and instability. For a lot of companies, you either get an x86 workstation or you don't do local dev. That's unfortunately the status-quo when dealing with traditional, legacy codebases, and it kinda puts the Macbook Pro on the same level of usability as an iPad or Raspberry Pi. Still cool and situationally useful, but if I'm just going to SSH into $OTHER_MACHINE for all of my work, I may as well just get a different laptop.
Totally, as I said in my comment, I would have done that in retrospect. The trouble was that we didn’t see that as a risk, since everyone was telling us that there wouldn’t be any issues
At slower speeds, enough that depending on what you're doing, it's not usable.
And it's not guaranteed to work anyway. We had some processes which I guess were compiled to use instructions that qemu wasn't emulating, so they would crash with illegal instruction errors.
Another annoyance is that your package repo may not actually publish arm versions of packages you use. This is usually the case for older stuff, e.g. MySQL 5.x was not released for arm and won't compile without backports. So, to fix the performance issues with emulation you may need to build some things yourself. Not a big deal, but also not an out of the box experience.
I'm genuinely curious what you need Docker and x86 together for.
Most Docker use cases tend to be server related and most hiccups running those on ARM have been solved by now (partly due to pushes for AWS Graviton cost savings and performance increases too, not just Apple).
Sorry, I don't see how apple has cut anyone out of their ecosystem, unless your opinion is that Apple should simply have stuck with intel, despite their own hardware being better by every metric?
As for cutting people out: every piece of software, including x86 I have tried has worked without a hitch. If your problem is that you need an x86 VM, then yeah you're kind hosed unless maybe intel&amd decided release their ISA royalty free?
Alternatively, you could just not write awful architecture dependent software, like all those developers happily using ARM laptops without a problem are mysteriously capable of.
If you've got arm64 images, it works great. If you have x86_64 images, it probably still works, but it's not a guarantee - we definitely have images at my workplace which do not work emulated - and it's substantially slower than on an x86 machine. On top of it being slower anyway, since Docker for Mac is running the daemon in a VM.
I'm really happy the M1/M2 exists, and I have access to an M1 MBP, but I'd still rather have a nice Linux laptop. Especially for containers.
Edit: One severe (to me) incompatibility I ran into with the M1 MBP is that it would not run my dual monitors (dell, displayport) through either of the TB3 docks (belkin, caldigit) I had available. I ended up replacing the monitors. Worked fine with the x86 MBP.
Regarding ARM docker images, can't you just update them to support ARM same as any non-Docker software you use?
Regarding Docker on Mac I totally agree. It's not worth it. At my workplace we simply run everything natively. We have to use Macs because we do iOS dev, but if we didn't then I'd definitely be tempted to get a linux laptop. May stick Asahi on my machine once the GPU support is ready.
Only if the software is published for ARM. See my other reply in this thread - you may be stuck using some older software that was never published for ARM, so while you can get it working, it may be on you to backport fixes and compile packages to build a new image yourself.
It can absolutely be done, though. It's just not necessarily as simple as "install the ARM one".
Yep. A lot of times, your legacy test suite will depend on some obscure Oracle Docker image that hasn't been updated since the late 'oughts, and unless you get it running then your tests won't run. On x86, this really isn't a problem. On Linux, you don't even need QEMU to get things working.
I wish this world was friendlier to the RISC ISAs of the world, but CISC supremacy is still real, and can hurt you.
More seriously, it wouldn't surprise me that there is a fair bit of software out there that is written with assembly or x86 intrinsics which isn't worth the time porting, especially if you're not going to deploy on ARM.
CalDigit support told me that it happened on the M1 Pro systems if the make/model of the monitors was identical, but I don't think that's true, because I replaced two identical monitors with two newer identical monitors and both of those work through a CalDigit TS3+.
There's a commercial bias at play with pretty much all review content, print or otherwise. I've been griping about this for years now. The major outlets and Youtubers all have relationships with various vendors in order to get early access to products so their reviews can coincide with the product launch.
This creates an inherent conflict of interest that has to shape their reviews in some form or another. The problem is that there's no transparency at all. They're talking with company reps before a product launches and signing embargo agreements to not release content early. I'm not saying that every piece of review content is low quality shill clickbait BS, but the reviewer has a relationship with a company and there's no way that doesn't influence their work given that early access is important for staying relevant in the space.
I see this sort of complaint like RedLetterMedia making fun of Nerd podcasts [1] by satirizing how they are given gift bags, white glove early screenings, and emails with (marketing) executives but if you look at YouTube or most media there’s plenty of critique of superhero/‘capeshit’ movies.
We’re not all being forced to watch cable tv and read the same two local newspapers anymore.
Some people like lowest common denominator McDonalds-type corporate content. I don’t see that changing in the future (ie, some future where these people are better informed).
Yeah, but you're not seeing the conversations going on behind the scenes.
This[0] is a great video that dives into how tablet manufacturers manipulate artists into shilling for their products. This kind of behavior is much more commonplace among tech review culture than people want to acknowledge (i.e. companies signing off on review videos before their posted, giving out free samples in exchange for positive reviews, etc.)
Ultimately, the goal of advertising now is to generate advertising content that doesn't look like advertising. Review videos are an incredible vehicle to accomplish this.
Yeah I guess the noise to signal ratio is way higher in tech reviews than movie/media world.
Maybe there will be a cultural reckoning once customers get wise to it like they have with other sorts of spin. Maybe the zoomer generation who grew up on TikTok will learn to spot bullshit influencer bait a mile away. Kinda like the 90s kids backlash against TV.
Personally I have both a surface studio laptop and a MBP. I find myself using the surface much more due to the touchscreen and pen input. It’s plenty fast and has great battery that lasts all day. Sure the MBP is really fast, but I mean, so what? So is the Surface. If I need to sign something on the MBP I still have to pull out an iPad, and I guess that’s the way Apple wants it.
This is what kills me about Apple right now. I want MacOS on the iPad so badly and I know I'm not the only one. They've kinda painted themselves into a corner as the iPads now run basically the same silicon as the MacBooks with such a stripped down OS. Having the option to run MacOS on the iPad would be incredible, but it would also likely cannibalize their market.
> Having the option to run MacOS on the iPad would be incredible, but it would also likely cannibalize their market.
I don't see it -- an ipad pro costs about the same amount or more than a macbook air. Seems like they could easily get a similar margin on either device.
> I want MacOS on the iPad so badly and I know I'm not the only one.
I've never understood this. I'd be curious if you could give me some perspective. I do know a lot of people would like it, so it's likely I'm just not seeing what they do.
I do like some convergence between the two platforms (similar functionality / "pick up either device and continue where you left off" on a lot of apps from messaging to 3P apps like OmniFocus) but I often switch from the ipad to the mac because of the power of the keyboard and the interface metaphors.
Microsoft has tried to jam the two together without (in IMHO) success as they have different affordances. Keyboard on an ipad is meh -- my macbook air is lighter than an ipad + magic keyboard.
I use my ipad a lot, both standalone for reading and as a pen accessory for my mac (Apple needs to do more work on this use case). I see lots of good, remaining opportunities for overlap but wouldn't want the OS of one on the hardware of the either.
I'm a longtime Mac user who bought a Microsoft Surface Pro last year that replaced my 2013 MacBook Air. Even though Windows is not my favorite OS, I like having a full-blown desktop/workstation OS on a device that I could take notes and draw on, and WSL has made Windows much more pleasant for me. Also, to be frank, the Microsoft Surface Pro is the closest thing we have to Alan Kay's Dynabook concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook ); in fact, I have Squeak (a Smalltalk environment that is a direct descendant of Smalltalk-80) on my Surface Pro.
The iPad Pro is fine hardware, but as a developer I find being restricted to the App Store for my applications very off-putting, and I personally believe this goes against what personal computing stands for; I'm willing to put up with these restrictions for phones, but not for tablets. macOS on an M1 iPad Pro, however, would be a game-changer.
I think for me it's the other way around; if I could write and draw on my Macbook, I would have less use for an iPad. I think with the Surface laptop studio I have, MS has done an excellent job of "jamming" the two together, much more so than the older Surface Book that has a detachable screen.
Assuming https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-laptops/ is the article being referred to, then the first section is what OS (with choices between Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, with MacOS kinda being recommended), and a whole section on which Apple laptop to get.
The Apple ecosystem is separate from the Windows ecosystem, even more so lately. And Apple silicon machines can't run windows at all, whereas the intel ones could be coaxed into it.
So there's just no real point in comparing Apple and Wintel machines side by side.
The author suggests that comparing Arm vs. x86 is easy due to a Geekbench test comparison. That's one of very few cross-platform benchmarks and highlights the fact that the author isn't very well-versed (if versed at all) in competitive performance analysis or PC benchmarks.
Geekbench is a terrible proxy for ANY workload, those subtests all run within the space of a few seconds -- they aren't meant to actually represent performance in sustained workloads.
Additionally, the smashing together of results from a wide range of incomparable applications, including unfair weighting that skews for memory, makes the cumulative scores largely worthless.
Finding other relevant benchmarks for comparison is difficult, especially given the locked down nature of MacOS.
>many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they’ve gone into denial, like Fox News cultists and climate change
Fuck this guy. Wish I can flag this multiple times into the oblivion. I don't like Macs because they are locked down both on software and hardware. It's not a "personal" computer. Literally have to dance around Apple's limitation all the time if you want to use something not approved by the high and almighty.
If you want to live a walled garden so be it. But don't call people "Fox News cultists and climate change deniers" just because they want to use something else.
Not sure what to make of it but according to nothlebookcheck benchmark[1] it seems like the AMD 6800u is very close to apple M2, close enough to consider it as a viable alternative.
The biggests wins of the m2 are still power efficiency and neural engine for video rendering.
Yes I noticed it too that more than once, pc news channels would only compare intel vs amd while the elephant in the room was that theses companies were both trying to catch up with apple cpus.
On the other hand you also have apple users that only care about comparing macbooks with other macbook. So it kinda goes both ways.
I would rather think that people who are OS agnostic and just care about their programs working to the best are a minority.
Likely the reason for exclusion of Apple laptops in most "Top/Best Laptops for 2022" posts is because these reviews are essentially clickbait affilate link schemes, and (most of the time) you can't make money selling new Apple laptops via affiliate links.
I would say this reason is probably not why they do it, but it would be my kustification: you basically do not own the hardware. You purchase the right to us it.
You might be happy with that, just as you might be happy with 8$ a gallon (cuz climuh change you know), but others might not agree.
Aww! I love these threads! 40 years or so of Apple and PC fanboys going at it. That's at least three generations of geeks! It's comforting like a bowl of Kraft Mac & Cheese or hot cocoa on a cold day.
It's nice! It reminds of days long past when I actually gave a fuck. :-)
well for the same reason they dont really compare Android phones to iPhones. we're past the point where it matters for most people. most phones today are fast enough and what matters are things like which os you like, battery life, camera performance, software support. very few people buy phones now based on the raw geekbench #'s
if you look hard enough there are benchmarks comparing apple to windows/linux for video editing, blender, compiling code, etc. the take away for the past couple years is that Apple is head and shoulders over anybody else in performance/watt
When I compare products with similar price/performance/efficiency ratios there's no one product/company that stands out to me. What the fuck is everyone on...
Mac enthusiasts just can't accept the fact that people prefer to buy Windows machines over Macs by a wide margin. I used to be one of them, but the closed hardware approach and the "we know best" attitude turned me off long ago.
That said, if I needed a super fast machine to do graphics or video, I'd look seriously at the new chips. I don't need such a machine.
Most people prefer to buy Wintel not because of religious or philosophical reasons of "closed" vs "open". Most people buy Wintel for the simple fact that most of the world aren't rich western countries, when they need computing devices, they buy the cheaper ones, which are Wintel.
For "computer enthusiasts", all they care about is games. If macOS could play the full Steam catalog, they would all flock to the Mac.
This metaphor is what the article is built in though: that excluding MacBooks from comparative reviews is a denial in the same way that Fox News denies climate change—
Both of which should be non-political topics, according to NASA[0]
If that is the metaphor the article is built on then it's starting from a point of illconsidered bias. That would seem to undermine the moat of the article...
It's possible to have made the argument and the point you've inferred here without triggering the partisan elements. And that's the part you seem to be missing.
I'll agree that it's a cliche but since the article was an allegory to An Inconvenient Truth any example of "someone who has part or all of their identity wrapped up in denying climate change" is going to be someone on the right political spectrum and Fox News/Drudge/Hannity have more name recognition than say Inhofe or Morano.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume Apple’s latest laptops have thoroughly wiped the floor against PCs.
If that’s the case, Apple’s computers are in a completely different class. You now have ARM machines that run macOS and x86 machines that run any other operating system.
Thus, if you’re looking for an x86 machine, you’re not buying an Apple product.
This isn’t some inconvenient truth. If you include macs in a PC review… there isn’t any point. You’d be comparing apples with oranges.
Yes. I wrote this entire comment to make that joke. :)