Comment by joe_mamba
1 day ago
>I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance.
DHH showed the Framework laptops with latest Intel Panther Lake SoCs having similar battery life to AS Macs (~14 hours) under Omarchy linux while gaming benchmarks put their iGPUs in line or better than AMD's Ryzne SoCs at gaming.
The era of long battery life being the USP feature exclusive to Macbooks is slowly going away, especially if AMD pulls a similar move and heats up the competition.
Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way.
X86_amd64 + Linux let's goooo!
The (memory) chip shortage saga is not going away for a few years. Most fabs are going to be capacity starved. Apple will happily pony up billions to TSMC to set up a new plant in exchange for exclusive capacity. No other laptop manufacturer can do this. This will put them in an even more advantageous position. In all honesty, the Neo couldn’t have arrived at a better time for them.
TSMC doesn't do memory.
AMD actually got access to TSMC 2nm before Apple: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-4-14-amd...
Also, a completely new fab takes up to five years to come online. The best bet is investing in increasing throughput of existing RAM plants, but that isn’t fast either. The other is buying RAM from Chinese suppliers which are less oversold (but not much, and not for long anyway).
I was commenting specifically on this bit:
> Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way.
EPYC (the 2nm AMD chip being produced at TSMC Arizona) is still going to support the datacenter demand, not consumer devices. You and I are still screwed. Apple is the only behemoth, IMO, that wields significant power against other trillion dollar companies. Not Acer, not HP, not even Dell (I don’t think). This is my personal opinion, I don’t have specific facts at hand to back it. Just a strong intuition.
But hey, govts might step in at some point and say - we need to put a cap on how much supply data-centres can buy. Since computers and phones are the backbone of modern society. There may be some rationing happening down the line.
Now they need to work on a fanless option. It would be nice to have at least one SKU be a silent machine with no moving parts.
That, in the x86 universe, has some heavy penalties in performance terms. I got myself a fanless “student” laptop (another name for “rugged”, but sells for less) and, while performance is acceptable, it ain’t fast - like a 10 year old i3.
I don’t think performance matters much to a lot of people. Look at how well the Neo is selling and it’s running what is essentially a phone SOC.
Forget about raw FLOPs and focus on performance per watt. Computers have been fast enough for most people for a decade now.