[procinct]

Generally this is surprising because the user bought the "Air" model instead of his usual "pro" model which is much more expensive. The impressive part here is that the air outperforms last years pro (according to the author) which is 3x the price.

[DennisAleynikov]

this is what people meant prior to the m1 coming out with "macs are a horrible deal"

they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market. they finally fixed their co-dependency with intel and suddenly wow the price gouging goes out the door because gasp the macbook air could have always been the pro it was just never possible with using old chips.

ANYTHING using arm absolutely FLIES

open your eyes people

[jeffbee]

Those ARM Chromebooks are/were the slowest computers on the market. There is nothing with an ARM CPU that "flies" except the new Macs. Using the same benchmark (Geekbench 5) the M1 has a single-core score of ~1700 and contemporaneous ARM competitors like the Lenovo Yoga 5C and the Surface Pro X get 700-750. The other ARM CPUs have equivalent performance to bottom-of-the-line mobile Intel processors from 2012. Apple M1 has the equivalent of Intel processors from some point in the future.

[DennisAleynikov]

false.

I daily drive a lenovo duet and its absolutely the closest thing to perfection in the modern computing realm. Its a surface go but running arm and chromeos and it flies thru all of my webapps like Framer, Figma, Plectica, Notion, Photopea, Visual Studio Code, Blender etc

m1 is scary fast, but also x64 is dead and needs to be transitioned to the new age. Apple or not this is a major shift in the dev market

and not only in $800+ price

the duet is $300

[jeffbee]

It's clear that you don't have enough experience with computers other than that one to support the statements you are making. I'm glad it is adequate for your purposes but to say that "it flies" is absurd. The Chromebook Duet scores 27 in the javascript benchmark Speedometer 2, while the MacBook Air scores 234. It is nine times faster. Looking at the single-thread geekbench 5 score, the Duet gets a score of 263, about half the performance of the dual-core Pentium CPU from 2008, a part which AnandTech once reviewed as part of a joke article. There's a supportable argument that the Chromebook Duet is the slowest laptop on the market today, without exception.

[messe]

> they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market

Were they though? With comparable displays and build quality, I think their laptops have been competitive with the upper end of the market for a while now, with maybe a 10-20% markup on that.

[DennisAleynikov]

fair, if you wanted good build good luck finding one outside of apple

I was more mad at the general markup relative to similar intel chips in say a Dell or HP ultralight

[pjmlp]

With their price I buy instead Thinkpad graphical workstations, no laptop CPU/GPU combo on Apple's side can match them.

[spurdoman77]

I have tried arm computers such as raspberry pi and they are slow. The linux arm projects seem to target just the cheapest price, m1 seems more like bang for buck. I hope linux hardware develops towards that.

[DennisAleynikov]

raspberry pi's werent even 64bit until the latest revision and are meant to be dirt cheap <$25 computers

the arm chromebooks like the lenovo duet absolutely murder the iPad pro or even the new iPad Air in terms of actually being a useful OS for devs

[Someone]

I don’t know whether that’s true, but that’s quite a change of subject from “macs are priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market”.

[DennisAleynikov]

the duet, the laptop I actually use is $300 which apple does not have a competing product with, its fair to claim in my head that even now its 3x more than what I am paying.

as an ex macbook pro main, I bought 3 of them over the course of last decade and a half and they have always had older intel brains than any xps or razer stealth I would try to cross shop with. after m1 apples price to performance ratio is at unreal levels

[lostlogin]

Mac MacBooks have generally lasted 10ish years. Sometimes more sometimes less. That’s awfully close in price to 3x $300 laptops in 10 years.

[denimnerd42]

yeah and then those are poor devs like me whose work notebook is a U series intel on an enterprise HP/DELL body which probably cost $800.

[DennisAleynikov]

some older intel chips are good and faithful (apple wasnt the ones passing the savings on to you like HP) they prefered to both give you outdated intel chips but also ask you $3500 for the honor