[bhouston]

Given how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.

[brucethemoose2]

We can get that with x86.

We just don't, because it's cheaper to clock the chips higher and burn more power, and to keep large graphics seperate from the CPU.

Intel's/AMD's attempts at addressing this (Broadwell/Skylake with eDRAM, Vega M, AMD's Van Gogh and Dragon Crest) were universally shot down by laptop OEMs. I don't know why, but they were probably just being cheap.

[bhouston]

I had the NUC with Vega M, the so called Hades Canyon, and it was awesome. Pricy but awesome. It was my media and gaming PC in the living room. For a while it was also the VR machine too with Steam-based VR working great.

[tjpnz]

Van Gogh is in the Steam Deck.

[brucethemoose2]

Yeah, but a little late, and the successor was seemingly canceled.

[eslaught]

Let's not exaggerate here. I've got the M2 Pro Mac Mini, and it is nearly silent, but depending on your workload you still generate nontrivial heat and the fans do need to run to keep it cool. Maybe I notice more because I build a lot of software, but this is not some magic bullet that avoids the need for traditional heat management.

[nicoburns]

Very much dependant on your workload. At least on my M1 Pro MacBook. I spend my day doing JavaScript and Rust dev and the fans spin up maybe once every few weeks. Usually when a process is accidentally in an infinite loop and consuming far more resources than it should. Occasionally when I need to compile something really big. And it only gets warm when I use it on my bed leaving it with no airflow at all.

[bhouston]

The fan never spins up for me (does the MacMini have a fan?), but then again I just do web development all day. I have my super powered machine (and hot and noisy) in the back room (Ryzen 5950X + NVIDIA RTX) that I remote into if I need to do a render.

[solardev]

I don't think web dev is particularly taxing. I never hear the fans go off while working (also a web dev), but try playing a game and it spins up after a minute or two, especially when playing recent games on GPT. Diablo IV makes them go whrrrr almost right after the menus.

On a M2 MacBook Pro with the lid closed.

[timschmidt]

We've had them direct from Intel since at least 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing

[mattpavelle]

Except OP said, "combined with great graphics performances" - the NUCs never had good graphics performance ... and their CPU performance was actually not that great either.

[timschmidt]

The same can literally be said about M1/M2 Macs. Graphics performance compared to anything discrete is terrible. My 3090Ti wipes the floor with an M2, despite being last generation's model. M2's CPU performance only looks good when divided by power consumption. Whole categories of Intel and AMD chips outperform it, just at higher power usage.

[solardev]

It's way better than other integrated GPUs though. And performance per watt matters a lot for heat and noise. I eventually gave up my gaming PC because it was so loud and hot, switching to Geforce Now instead.

[timschmidt]

I own an M1 and like it. But loading it up feels like loading up any other NUC style machine. I'm not sure on what axis it's better. Folks talk up the memory bandwidth, but in Apple's design, neither CPU, GPU, or NPU have access to full memory bandwidth. Not even close. Apple's caches are fast at 3 cycles, but AMD's are 10x larger. Apple's GPU claims further complicated given that they want everyone to use Metal as opposed to OpenGL, Vulkan, or DirectX on their platform. And compatibility and speed suffer as a result. Heat and noise are indeed important, from my perspective it simply seems that Apple's chosen a particular spot on the curve with an attractive outcropping thanks to early integration of on-package DRAM, but otherwise nothing special. Other manufacturers will ship on-package DRAM. AMD and NVIDIA have been shipping on-package HBM to the datacenter for an age.

If anything, it seems that Apple's much larger product - the iphone - had a lot more to do with M1/M2 design than high end desktop equipment. On package DRAM is common in cell phones to reduce board size. And M1 is a scaled up A series SoC. I think it's a great product for Apple. But as someone who's supported Mac, Linux, and Windows machines at a university for a decade, it doesn't feel appreciably different from Intel NUCs over that timespan. AMD's 7840U is setting a new standard for power and performance on the PC side right now. And the two will continue to leapfrog.

[solardev]

I have trouble finding objective flops/watts or similar tests, but subjectively, Apple Silicon is fast, quiet, and long-lasting in a way that no laptop has ever been for me. It's a dramatic upgrade in performance, noise, battery life, and heat vs all the previous laptops I've ever owned or used, including Intel MacBooks, ThinkPads, Surface Books, Chromebooks, small biz machines, gaming machines, and countless others.

"Sweet spot" is exactly right. It's not the best at anything but the best balanced that I've ever used, by a huge margin.

I don't think it's magic either and I hope that Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia etc. can deliver a similar package in a future laptop. For now though they seem hopelessly behind, at least among the products I've used.

Also, among those companies, Nvidia is the only one I'd trust to do a decent end user experience. Maybe Google to some degree, but they'd end up sunsetting the product after a generation or two.

Microsoft tried to do the same with the Surface line, but every single one I've used sucks. The tablets are way too heavy and clunky. The laptops overheated and couldn't even charge while playing games. Windows has a ton of ads.

Apple's integration of all the things really makes it a standout in today's commoditized and enshittified world, IMO. It's not just tech specs but how the product feels to use at the end of the day.

[brucethemoose2]

eDRAM Broadwell was respectable.

Unsurprisingly, Intel made it for Apple, and they were pretty much the only OEM that used it.

Anyway, I think Intel sold some NUCs with them, but they were very expensive.

[timschmidt]

Intel sold it as Iris Plus graphics and Intel NUC units with Iris Plus were available as part of the product lineup: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/graphic...