[deep-root]

If you're shopping for a Macbook Pro, gaming is the extremely narrow use-case, no?

Edit: various benchmarks seem to show the M1 Max games at about the FPS of a RTX 3060L (though with lower power). It's around the same price as a similarly spec'd 3060L gaming laptop.

[kitsunesoba]

It's going to get a lot less hot and noisy than a similarly specced 3060 laptop while also having vastly better battery life, which is worth something (varies depending on one's personal priorities). I would imagine a lot of people looking for portable power might value those qualities enough to trade away some raw graphical muscle.

[mhh__]

Well it's narrow historically but apple did seem to be implying it could game competitively with the latest from Nvidia. Which it apparently can (although there are practically no games), just bump the model down a step from what apple are saying.

Also M1 Max seems to be on the order of a £1000 more than a 3080 equipped laptop, where are you getting that figure from?

[olliej]

The problem with “latest from X” is that there’s such a wide perf gap between the latest budget device and the latest high perf one.

I also got irked by their comparison to old baseline gpu perf. Everyone knows intels integrated gpu is terrible, so comparing to that is pointless.

[LegitShady]

It's signiticantly more expensive than a 3060 equipped Zephyrus and that doesn't change apples marketing pretending it was a 3080.

[vesrah]

Having owned one of those Zephyrus and owning a M1X there is no comparison on terms of quality or usability. Zephyrus is hot, loud, has a poor screen in comparison, and poor battery life.

[LegitShady]

You're right about the battery life, but in exchange an AMD zephyrus is significantly more performant at a lower price. That's a fair trade off.

It's also not a ticking time bomb, since the SSD can be changed without sending the device into apple to change the entire CPU/SSD/GPU combo. Every one of these apple devices basically has planned obsolescence built in.

[katbyte]

The person your responding to listed 5 things the m1 max was better at. You responded by saying “but it’s faster!!!” While addressing none of them.

[LegitShady]

some of those things are just subjective ('usability'), and some are part of the trade-off I was talking about. The zephyrus isn't as hot or loud when its limiting itself to the mac pros performance.

[kaba0]

It’s only faster at GPU, no? CPU-wise it is really hard to beat even the regular M1.

[LegitShady]

A ryzen 9 is slower single core but faster multi core performance than an m1, but of course its TDP is higher so battery life will be significantly different.

If you care about having 20 hours of battery life instead of 8-10, the m1 is definitely going to win that. But from a pure performance perspective there are chips on the market faster than the m1 in the laptop sphere from AMD already.

If you get an zephyrus with an AMD cpu and a dedicated GPU you will pay less than the macbook pro and be more performant, in exchange for a hotter laptop with lower battery life. But that's just a tradeoff, not necessarily a win one way or another. I've never needed 20 hours of battery life and I don't prioritize it. 8-10 is enough for me. I'd rather have the faster machine.

And I can change the SSD or RAM myself without expecting it to make itself implode later in its lifespan because its all in one package as the apple silicon is.