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by halostatue 1298 days ago
No one else makes a laptop that has the power / thermal / battery / weight spec combination that Apple does, and none of them are ARM laptops, either.

To exceed the Apple M1 / M2 specs with anyone else’s hardware, you need to give up on other specs that matter greatly to those of us who care about things like that.
2 comments
formerly_proven 1298 days ago
The M1 Air is almost three pounds, not that a lightweight laptop.
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2OEH8eoCRo0 1298 days ago
Oh. I forgot that power/thermal/weight is the only spec that matters.

The point is that not everyone cares as much about perf/watt and there are plenty of comparable computers which surpass Apple laptops in different areas.

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Jcowell 1298 days ago
> power/thermal/weight is the only spec that matters.

For a laptop these specs hold considerable weight.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 1298 days ago
https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel
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halostatue 1297 days ago
Amongst other issues with this sort of nonsense benchmark:

1. Does not indicate the amount of power used during the compilation (again, no one has equivalent performance / watt as the Apple Silicon chips).

2. Does not report the speed of the disks involved.

3. Does not report the amount, type, and speed of the RAM involved.

4. Does not report anything about the compilation environment (cross-compiling, running in an x86 VM, running in any VM, etc.)

Are there faster computers than Apple Silicon computers? Yup. Are there faster computers that have the same power and thermal specs? It’s possible, but I have yet to see a single benchmark that reports anything close which is available to most people.

It’s not just laptops, BTW. Amazon Graviton 2 machines run in server farms that consume less power and are cooler than their x86 equivalents.

Please stop being blinkered by your prejudices.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 1297 days ago
What prejudice? They are unmatched (AFAIK) in perf/watt. The original post that I replied to stated that there are no "acceptable or comparable" hardware. I think that's subjective but false. Comparable doesn't mean exactly the same. Similar is good enough. I take acceptable to mean usable. There are plenty of other usable machines.
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halostatue 1297 days ago
Anything that has less battery life at comparable capability is neither similar nor acceptable to me. Anything that looks like it’s going to cook my nethers as I use it on my lap is neither similar nor acceptable to me.

Absolutely no PC manufacturer matches the build quality, battery life, weight, thermal management, power consumption, and performance capability that the current round of Apple laptops provide. From my perspective, that means that there’s nothing acceptable or comparable.

In the year or so that I’ve had this Mac, I’ve heard the fan spin up a total of three times, and while I’m not doing heavy compiles often, there’s no other computer that I’ve owned with active cooling that is as quiet as this has been (using its passive cooling for all but those three times, all caused by runaway processes triggered by the problem in the chair).

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