[dagw]

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.

But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.

I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.

[semi-extrinsic]

What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15 ? It is benchmarking pretty close to the M1 Pro, and you can get it for around $1800.

[dagw]

Weight and real world battery life would be two things. Almost certainly build quality. The screen almost certainly isn't as nice. Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. If I need 'real' performance I'll use a chunky Ryzen/Threadripper desktop computer running Linux over any laptop on the market.

Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again.

Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it.

edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.

[Filligree]

At least on the 2021 model G14/15, sleep is outright disabled. They never did get it to work. There's also a relay-based cutoff for the discrete nvidia gpu, because that was the only way Asus could find to prevent phantom power draw on battery.

It still doesn't have anywhere near as good battery life as a macbook, and while the CPU is fast, it's slower than the M1.

[O_H_E]

> Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc.

Yeah! I feel like I have been needing a word for that for sometime.

Never had a mac, but surprisingly I have the same exact experience with my IT_managed_Dell+Windows+Antivirus vs my 6yo thinkpad with linux (even months of uptime)

even plain process spawning from powershell is slow, that AV is just hell.

[wlesieutre]

4 GB dedicated VRAM instead of 16 GB shared memory is better/worse depending on workload.

Heat, battery life, fan noise, etc have been discussed to death so I'll gloss over those. Past that, the other huge thing is the screen:

62.5% sRGB coverage is a really garbage color gamut. Supposedly the "G513IM-HQ088R" gets you a DCI-P3 screen but I literally can't find that model available for purchase anywhere to check what it costs.

1920x1080 vs 3024x1964 is about 1/3 the pixel count of the 14" Mac. Or compared to the 16" 3456x2234 it's about 1/4 the pixel count.

[swiftcoder]

> What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15?

A beautiful high-resolution display and half a day's battery life, primarily. Also the ROG Strix trackpads are truly awful, but YMMV on that front

[r00fus]

You have to install Windows or none of the benchmarks are meaningful. That's a showstopper for me. Forums say installing linux on there is an undertaking and you end up with critical drivers still not working (Mic, etc).

Who knows when a random driver stops working due to a kernel patch.

[peoplefromibiza]

> But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.

Or branding...

Which I can accept.

[dagw]

Or branding...

Which I can accept.

As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.