Comment by palata
3 hours ago
Is the hardware so much better, or is their integration superior? macOS can be bloated but still more efficient, right?
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
3 hours ago
Is the hardware so much better, or is their integration superior? macOS can be bloated but still more efficient, right?
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
I was required to use a Macbook Air in my last job. I hated small things like the window management, the keyboard lack of delete, home, etc keys. There were ways to work around this. Cold aluminium in an aircon office though was no fun, and the keyboard lacked travel.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
Are you sure about ESC? I looked at MacBook Air pictures on DDG, and they all had an escape key in the upper left. I've never seen a Mac without one. If you're using it for VI, Ctrl-[ is also ESC (and avoids stretching your fingers).
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
Try a Mac with corporate spyware installed. My company issued M2 pro was draining the battery in 3 hours while being super hot and noisy.
I think eventually they pushed a spyware update that improved a bit the situation but not by a lot.
Meanwhile my personal M1 Pro had truly full day battery life.
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
On a base M1 air, running local inference (non tool calling).
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The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
The majority(?) of Intel MacBooks didn't have dGPUs though. That was a higher-end option on the larger models. I also vaguely remember there being a big leap in iGPU performance with Intel Iris around 2013. I had a high-end MBP from work and wished I could perma disable the dGPU, cause I didn't need it and it just made the thing get hot.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
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That is my exact take - new Mac Book Pro M5. Love the battery, like the hardware quality, don't care at all for the rest of it. MacOS is annoying.
nice that you can simply run your favorite OS (virtualized)
their single core perf is just much better than anyone else
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
And the benchmarks seem to understate this. That i9-9001THIKK doesn't matter when it thermal throttles a few seconds into a task. Are they testing these laptops inside freezers or something?
They also seem to have the biggest memory pool attached to a GPU at a “reasonable“ price don’t they? There’s a reason people really want Mac Studios.