[gautamcgoel]

Surprisingly not that much to be excited about IMO. AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node and the CPUs only officially support DDR5 speeds up to 5600MHz (yes, I know that you can use faster RAM). The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2.

[mrweasel]

> AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node

Staying on an older node might ensure AMD the production capacity they need/want/expect. If they had aimed for the latest 3nm then they'd have get in line behind Apple and Nvidia. That would be my guess, why aim for 3nm, if you can't get fab time and you're still gaining a 15% speed increase.

[arvinsim]

TBH, CPUs nowadays are mostly good enough for the consumer, even at mid or low tiers.

It's the GPUs that are just getting increasing inaccessible, price wise.

[michaelt]

Yes - with more and more users moving to laptops and wanting a longer battery life, raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade.

A decade ago, Steam's hardware survey said 8GB was the most popular amount of RAM [1] and today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM.

In some ways that's been a good thing - it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.stea...

[vitus]

> raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade.

In general, CPU clock speeds stagnated about 20 years ago because we hit a power wall.

In 1985, the state of the art was maybe 15-20MHz; in 1995, that was 300-500MHz; in 2005, we hit about 3GHz and we've made incremental progress from there.

It turns out that you can only switch voltages across transistors so many times a second before you melt down the physical chip; reducing voltage and current helps but at the expense of stability (quantum tunneling is only becoming a more significant source of leakage as we continue shrinking process sizes).

Most of the advancements over the past 20 years have come from pipelining, increased parallelism, and changes further up the memory hierarchy.

> today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM.

That's an unfair comparison. Apple has a history of shipping less RAM with its laptops than comparable PC builds (the Air shipped with 2GB in the early 2010s, eventually climbing up to 8GB by the time the M1 launched).

Further, the latest iteration of the Steam hardware survey shows that 80% of its userbase has at least 16GB of RAM, whereas in 2014 8GB was merely the plurality; not even 40% of users had >= 8GB. A closer comparison point would have been the 4GB mark, which 75% of users met or exceeded.

[michaelt]

> That's an unfair comparison.

When I visit retailers' websites, the 8GB product category seems to be the one with the most products on offer. Dell, Asus, Acer, HP and Lenovo are also more than happy to sell you a laptop with 8GB of RAM, today. Although I would agree don't charge $1600 and call them "Pro"

So 8GB machines are still around, and not just in the throwaway $200 laptop segment.

I would agree with you that the 2024 Steam hardware survey shows a plurality of users with 16GB, whereas the 2014 survey said 8GB, so progress hasn't entirely stopped. But compared to the glory days of Moore's Law, a doubling over 10 years is not much.

[vitus]

> So 8GB machines are still around, and not just in the throwaway $200 laptop segment.

You're not wrong here! I entirely agree that 8GB laptops are still very much a thing, and RAM hasn't been growing at quite the same rate that it had been. But I'd bet most of those models with 8GB of RAM are much closer to the $800 range (if not more like $600).

I maintain that a closer statement is that typical RAM configurations increased by 4x over 10 years (aka doubling every 5 years). That is admittedly still a far cry from Moore's law doubling every 18 months.

And: the Steam hardware survey is obviously biased toward people who play video games on their computers, which in turn is biased toward people who like to play video games on higher-spec machines. Some of that takes the form of better graphics cards with more VRAM, but you certainly can find gaming laptops on the market with 64GB or even 128GB of RAM, whereas 10-15 years ago, that was the size of the SSD.

I remember in 2011 that 16GB was a lot of RAM even in a desktop (I purchased a kit of 4x4GB for about $100); these days, you can buy twice that amount in a single stick for cheaper. Manufacturers can put more RAM in machines if they want, but there isn't really enough demand to justify a different model with a corresponding increase in sticker price.

[antisthenes]

> it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up.

I'm sorry, "used to be" ? 90% of the last decade of hardware advancement was eaten up by shoddy bloated software, where we now have UI lag on the order of seconds, 8GB+ of memory used all the time by god knows what and a few browser tabs and 1 core always peaking in util (again, doing god knows what).

[michaelt]

I don't dispute that software is currently bloated - I'm just saying the rate of increase of bloat is now much reduced.

Taking Steam's hardware survey as an example, from 2004 [1] to 2014 [2] RAM increased from 512 MB to 8 GB.

From 2014 to 2024 [3] RAM increased from 8 GB to 16 GB.

Software has bloated by 2x in a decade. But in the preceding decade, it bloated by 16x so keeping it down to a mere 2x is quite restrained in comparison.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040630214045/http://steampower... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.stea... [3] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

[antisthenes]

> I'm just saying the rate of increase of bloat is now much reduced.

The rate of increase of bloat is now reduced, because hardware advancements rate of increase is also now reduced.

The bloat takes up all the hardware advancements, so of course they'll just be in line with each other.

[CivBase]

To be fair, a decade ago gaming PCs came with 2GB to 4GB of vRAM. Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM. Most games don't demand a lot of system memory, so it makes sense that PC gamers would invest in other components.

You're also comparing Windows x86 gaming desktops from a decade ago with macOS AppleSilicon base-spec laptops today. Steam's recent hardware survey shows 16GB as the most popular amount of RAM [1]. Not the 5x increase we've seen in vRAM, but still substantial.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

[faeriechangling]

Tons of gamers are on 8gb because of mobile GPUs and becuase the only affordable 12gb GPU Nvidia has ever released is the 3060 which is a desktop GPU. I don’t honestly expect 12gb+ to become mainstream until 6000 series.

[CivBase]

According to the Steam hardware survey, about 58% of the current-gen GPUs being used (NVIDIA 4000s and AMD 7000s) have 12GB+ of vRAM. I'd argue it's already mainstream - at least among "PC gamers". Obviously there is still plenty of old hardware out there, but I'm specifically focused on what people are buying new today because that's what OP was looking at.

[ChoGGi]

> Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM.

8-20 GB of VRAM

[faeriechangling]

I honestly think that given the demands of 4K video specifically using potentially a few gigs of memory just for decoding, 8gb made a world of sense, but little has come out since that really needs all that much memory for the average person.

When the industry moves to lpddr6/ddr6 I wouldn’t be shocked to see an increase to 6gb per module standard although maybe some binned 4gb modules will still be sold.

[MenhirMike]

Given that there are only 2 CUs in the GPU (and fairly low clock speeds), does the architecture matter much? Benchmarks were kinda terrible, and it looks to me that the intent of the built-in GPU is for hardware video encoding or to run it in a home server system, or emergency BIOS and the like. Compared to the desktop CPUs, even the lowest end mobile 8440U has 4 CUs, going up to 12 CUs on the higher end. Or go with Strix Point, which does have an RDNA 3.5 GPU (with 12 or 16 CUs) in it.

I guess you _can_ game on those 2 CU GPUs, but it really doesn't seem to be intended for that.

[spixy]

Better efficiency with three external 4K 120Hz monitors?

[MenhirMike]

Oh, there's plenty of good uses for it, but I was specifically wondering why the previous poster cared for it being RDNA 2 instead of RDNA 3 since I don't think it makes a difference outside of gaming, and it's a pretty bad gaming GPU because of the low core count.

So I was curious if there was anything else that RDNA 3/3.5 would offer over RDNA 2 in such a low end configuration.

[MenhirMike]

(Oh, just realized that "better efficiency" could mean that RDNA 3 can do the office work that RDNA 2 does but with lower power usage. That could be true, though I wonder if that would really be significant savings in any way)

[cschneid]

Yeah, I'm glad they started including built in gpu so there's something there, but beyond booting to a desktop I wouldn't use this graphics for anything else. But if you're just running a screen and compiling rust, that's all you need. Or in my case, running a home server / NAS.

[philsnow]

When building a non-APU ryzen machine for homelab use, I ended up buying the very cheapest graphics card I could find that was compatible, a "GeForce GT 710" that was not a beefy card when it was released in 2014. It's.. fine. After getting the system working I passed it through to a win10 VM and I can play non-FPS windows-only steam games over RDP.

So yeah next time I build a machine I'll appreciate having this built in.

[MenhirMike]

Yeah, I have several GT 710's which also came in a PCIe x1 variant so I could keep the x16 slot free for something better. Glad that's no longer needed - the built-in GPU is a legit good thing.

[AlfeG]

> DDR5 speeds up to 56000MHz (yes, I know that you can use faster RAM)

Not sure that I actually CAN. 56 GHz is already a lot.

[gautamcgoel]

Fixed, thanks :)

[orphea]

5600 are MT/s (megatransfers/second), not MHz ;)

[re-thc]

> The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2

Faster GPU is reserved for APUs. These graphics are just here for basic support.

[diffeomorphism]

Nah, you can get RDNA3.5 if you want to (not sure why you want that in a (home)server though)

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21419/amd-announces-the-ryzen...

[Arrath]

Well perhaps I will stop holding out and just get the 7800x3d, if the 9000 generation won't be too terribly groundbreaking.

[doikor]

> The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2.

The GPU on these parts is there mostly for being able to boot into BIOS or OS for debugging. Basically when things go wrong and you want to debug what is broken (remove GPU from machine and see if things work)

[matharmin]

These are decent GPUs for anything other than heavy gaming. I'm driving two 4k screens with it, and even for some light gaming (such as factorio) it's completely fine.

[123yawaworht456]

I'm under the impression that Factorio can run on any GPU capable of producing video output at all. years ago when I played it, it ran perfectly fine on whatever iGPU my 4790K had. 60 FPS/UPS with pretty big bases (although iirc I did disable all video effects like smoke to avoid cluttering the screen)

[nolist_policy]

The 'Ryzen 7000 iGPU" (Why is there no official codename?!) can even run GTA 5 at low/medium settings.

[glimshe]

I know it's hard to believe, but GTA V is now over 10 years old...

[Loudergood]

But does it run Crysis?

[user_7832]

I agree, my 780m is quite capable in most games. Depending on the resolution & settings even cyberpunk 2077 is playable at 60fps. MS Flight sim though hits (presumably the memory bandwidth bottleneck) hard.

[doikor]

The GPU in the APU is on a totally different level when compared to the 2 core RDNA 2 one in the “normal” CPUs

For example the 780m you mentioned has 12 cores and newer architecture so is probably something like 10 to 15 times more powerful.

[user_7832]

Thanks for the clarification, I think I got confused with the other desktop chip(s?) that have a 780m.

[MaKey]

The 780m is RDNA3 though.

[user_7832]

Thanks, missed it. Is the steamdeck rdna2? That's also decently capable.

[_cenw]

Sort of. The generation is RDNA2, but it's unlike all other RDNA2 chips because the focus is so much on energy efficiency (and the APU has its own codename, van gogh)

[moooo99]

Hard disagree on that one. I am daily driving an RDNA2 graphics unit for 1.5 years now and it’s absolutely sufficient. I mostly do office work and occasionally play Minecraft. It’s absolutely sufficient for that and I don’t see any reason why you‘d want to waste money on a dGPU for that kind of load

[nickjj]

Another advantage of having an integrated GPU is you can do a GPU pass-through and let a VM directly and fully use your dedicated GPU.

This could be a thing if you're running native Linux but some games only work on Windows which you run in a VM instead of dual booting.

[ffsm8]

I have to disagree. They work great for video playback and office work. So media server, and workstations are fine without a dedicated gpu

[ubercore]

> The GPU on these parts is there mostly for being able to boot into BIOS or OS for debugging.

That's wildly not true. Transcoding, gaming, multiple displays, etc. They are often used as any other GPU would be used.

[TacticalCoder]

> The GPU on these parts is there mostly for being able to boot into BIOS or OS for debugging.

Not at all. I drive a 38" monitor with the iGPU of the 7700X. If you don't game and don't run local AI models it's totally fine.

And... No additional GPU fans.

My 7700X build is so quiet it's nearly silent. I can barely hear it's Noctua NH-12S cooler/fan ramping up when under full load and that's how it should be.

[JonChesterfield]

They also mean you can drive monitors using the builtin GPU while using dedicated ones for compute.

[btgeekboy]

Yeah - I've been waiting to see what this release would entail as I kinda want to build a SFF PC. But now that I know what's in it, and since they didn't come out with anything really special chipset-wise, I'll probably just see if I can get some current-get stuff at discounted prices during the usual summer sales.

[aurareturn]

It's because x86 chips are no longer leading in the client. ARM chips are. Specifically, Apple chips. Though Qualcomm has huge potential leapfrog AMD/Intel chips in a few generations too.

[KingOfCoders]

[If you're a laptop user, scroll down the thread for laptop Rust compile times, M3 Pro looks great]

You're misguided.

Apple has excellent Notebook CPUs. Apple has great IPC. But AMD and Intel have easily faster CPUs.

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...

Blender Benchmark

      AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (16 core)         560.8
      Apple M2 Ultra (24 cores)           501.82
      Apple M3 Max (12 cores)             408.27
      Apple M3 Pro                        226.46
      Apple M3                            160.58

It depends on what you're doing.

I'm a software developer using a compiler that 100%s all cores. I like fast multicore.

      Apple Mac Pro, 64gb, M2 Ultra, $7000
      Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Pro, 2TB SSD, $2600

[Edit2] Compare to: 7950x is $500 and a very fast SSD is $400, fast 64gb is $200, very good board is $400 so I get a very fast dev machine for ~$1700 (0,329 p/$ vs. mini 0,077 p/$)

[Edit] Made a c&p mistake, the mini has no ultra.

[aurareturn]

That seems wrong.

Though Blender may have an optimization for avx512 but not for SME or Neon.

But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender.

Try SPEC or its close consumer counterpart, Geekbench.

As an anecdote, all my Python and Node.js applications run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4. Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon.

[arp242]

Now you're just asserting things unencumbered by even the slightest evidence.

On Passmark Apple CPUs are pretty far down the list.

On Geekbench I gave up after scrolling a few pages.

And "run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4" means nothing. On the low end you have fairly cheap Ryzen 3 laptop chips, and on the high end you have Threadripper behemoths.

[aurareturn]

Passmark is a pretty bad CPU benchmark. It generally has poor correlation.

I would stick to SPEC and Geekbench.

Even Cinebench 2024 isn't too bad nowadays though R23 was quite poor in correlation.

In general, not only are Apple Silicon CPUs faster than AMD consumer CPUs, but they're 2-4x more power efficient as well.

[AnthonyMouse]

The problem with Geekbench is it's trying to average the scores from many different benchmarks, but then if some of them are outliers (e.g. one CPU has hardware acceleration or some other unusual aptitude for that specific workload), it gets an outsized score which is then averaged in and skews the result even if it doesn't generalize.

What you want to do is look at the benchmarks for the thing you're actually using it for.

> they're 2-4x more power efficient as well.

This is generally untrue, people come to this conclusion by comparing mobile CPUs with desktop CPUs. CPU power consumption is non-linear with performance, so a large power budget lets you eek out a tiny bit more margin. For example, compare the 65W 5700X with the 105W 5800X. The 40 extra watts buys you around 2% more single thread performance, not because the 5700X has a more efficient design -- they're the exact same CPU with a different power cap. It's because turning up the clock speed a tiny bit uses a lot more power, but desktop CPUs do it anyway, because they don't have any such thing as battery life and people want the extra tiny bit more. Or the CPU simply won't clock any higher and doesn't even hit the rated TDP on single-threaded workloads.

The extra power will buy you a lot more on multi-threaded workloads, because then you get linear performance improvement with more power by adding more cores. But that's where the high core count CPUs will mop the floor with everything else -- while achieving higher performance per watt, because the individual cores are clocked lower and use less power.

[arp242]

> I would stick to SPEC and Geekbench.

I will repeat:

"On Geekbench I gave up after scrolling a few pages."

SPEC doesn't seem to have easily browsable results, but we can find the Cinebench 2024 ones easy and guess what? Apple isn't at the top. Not even close: https://www.cgdirector.com/cinebench-2024-scores/

[KingOfCoders]

"But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender."

And the argument is, you can't use Blender to compare CPU performance because of that?

"Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon."

As a Go developer, I'd love to hear your story: How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)? For example 100k lines of Go code.

I might switch back to Apple again (used Apple for 20+ years), if it's faster at compilation speed.

[hajile]

M4 is looking pretty interesting. Near 10% IPC uplift and they bumped the e-core on the base M4, so we're probably looking at the same 12 p-cores for the M4 max, but likely going from 4 to 12 e-cores (two of the 6-core complexes).

In multithreaded workloads, 2 of their current e-cores are roughly equivalent to 1 p-core, so that would represent the equivalent of 4 extra p-cores.

[resource_waste]

> How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)?

Good ol, compare a $400 piece of equipment with a $3000 piece of equipment. I wonder what will win. (unironically, most of the time, the $3000 piece of equipment doesnt win)

[KingOfCoders]

What is this $400 piece of equipment?

[tsimionescu]

On Geekbench, though they are segregated in separate pages so I'm not sure if the comparison is fully correct, the M2Ultra is behind the top 3 PC processors (2 Intel and 1 AMD) for multi-core, and it is indeed the best at single core.

[KingOfCoders]

Yes see the GB6 benchmarks for compilation

    M2 Ultra   233.9 Klines/sec
    7950x      230.3 Klines/sec  
    14900K     215.3 Klines/sec  
    M3 Max     196.5 Klines/sec

are nearly the same.

[rubin55]

Would that be comparing to Windows on Zen4 or to Linux on Zen4? On Windows I've noted that especially forking performance takes a big hit which causes many dynamic languages that do stuff with say invoking a runtime binary being 100s of times slower on windows (tried with bash and python).

[hajile]

There's something wrong with your M3 Max stuff. I believe it comes in 14 and 16-core variants while the M3 Pro comes in 11 and 12-core variants.

In any case, M3 Max uses less than 55w of power in CPU-only workloads while a desktop 7950x peaked out at 332w of power according to Guru3D (without an OC).

The fact that M2 Ultra hits so close while peaking out at only around 100w of CPU power is pretty crazy (M2 Ultra doesn't even hit 300w with all CPU and GPU cores maxed out).

[KingOfCoders]

Yes you're right the M3 Max has 14/16 and the M3 Pro 11/12 cores.

[wtallis]

> Blender Benchmark

Maybe use a benchmark that actually makes sense for CPUs, rather than something that's always much faster on a GPU (eg. M3 Pro as any sane user would use it for Blender is 2.7x the performance of a Ryzen 7950X, not 0.4x).

> Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Ultra, 2TB SSD, $2600

Not a real thing. You meant M2 Pro, because the Max and Ultra chips aren't available in the Mac mini.

[KingOfCoders]

I would love to quote a compiler comparison, but I don't know a good and accepted compiler benchmark. What would you use as a compiler benchmark? (Preferably Go, but I assume Rust would be better, as it is much slower, so the differences are bigger)

(corrected my c&p mistake with the mini, thanks)

[phonon]

You can look at the Geekbench 6 component.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals... (page 18)

[KingOfCoders]

Thanks, Clang looks good, now I need to check how to sort CPUs/systems by the Clang benchmark, no success for now.

"Randomly" picking

    14900K     215.3 Klines/sec  
    7950x      230.3 Klines/sec  
    M2 Ultra   233.9 Klines/sec
    M3 Max     196.5 Klines/sec

[JonChesterfield]

Building clang using itself is a reasonable approximation to a compiler benchmark, speaking as someone who spends a depressing fraction of his life doing that over and over for permutations of the source code. That's somewhere in the five to ten minutes range on a decent single socket system.

[KingOfCoders]

Do you know of a benchmark site that compares clang compilations for different systems (CPU/RAM/SSD)?

[codewithcheese]

Think chromium compile is widely used

[KingOfCoders]

Can you point me to a comparison site? Didn't find a M3/M2/7950/... comparison site for chromium compile times :-(

(Even phoronix is scares and mostly focuses on laptops - I have no laptop)

[bee_rider]

Is blender 100% GPU now? Last time I used it, there were multiple renderers available, and it wasn’t a 100% win to switch to GPU. IIRC the cpu did better in ray tracing(?). This was a couple years ago though so things may have changed or I might not be recalling correctly.

[wtallis]

I think GPU rendering was always faster as long as you had a supported GPU. Now that the Cycles renderer has support for all the major GPU APIs/vendors, the only reasons to render on the CPU are if you don't have a half-decent GPU, or if your scene doesn't fit in your GPU's memory. Neither of those are a concern on Apple systems.

At least on NVIDIA hardware, Blender can use the GPU's raytracing capabilities rather than just the general-purpose GPU compute capabilities. Which means it doesn't take a very expensive GPU at all to outperform high-end CPUs.

[krasin]

Until ARM has a proper UEFI support, it's not a practical desktop/server with a few notable exceptions (Mac, Raspberry Pi) and only because there's so much support from the respective vendors.

I know that there's some work happening about UEFI+ARM (https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/Unified%20Extensible...), but its support is very rare. The only example I can recall is Ampere Altra: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/ampere-altra-max-wind...

[walterbell]

Thanks to ex-Apple Nuvia/Oryon ("Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite"), Arm laptops will launch in the next few months from Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and other OEMs, with UEFI support for Windows and in-progress support for Linux, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422286

[bitwize]

It's like I keep saying: the first Chinese manufacturer to churn out cheap SBCs with ServerReady support will make a killing as a true Pi killer. Anyone? Anyone? Pine64? Pine64?

[esskay]

We dont really need a Pi killer anymore. They've done a fine job of killing it themselves. Their community has shrunk massively due to low cost mini pc's being leaps and bounds better value than a Pi now. Their two fingers being put up at the hacker/tinkerer hobbyist market over the last few years combined with the IPO and shift to B2B has made it very clear where their priorities lie.

Unless you need the GPIO theres zero reason to overpay for a Pi 5 for example when you can pick up decent second hand mini pc's on ebay for a lower price.

Case in point, a couple of months ago I was able to nab two brand new still in box Dell Optiplex 3050's (Core i7 6700T 4 Cores, 2.8Ghz, 16GB RAM Win 10 hardware license, 256gb ssd, with mouse & keyboard) for £55 each delivered. The base 4gb model Pi 5 comes in at £80-£100 once you add power, storage and a case.

Sure, its not ARM but you're not likely to be doing anything that _needs_ ARM.

[viraptor]

> Unless you need the GPIO theres zero reason to overpay for a Pi 5

Even then, both usb-to-gpio and mini PCs with gpio exist. Unless you want something really small, then there's still pi zero and Arduino

[ZiiS]

Try matching the size, power draw, and price of the Zero.

[esskay]

Thats about the only area the Pi is superior at this point. For the usecases where a zero is all you need its a no brainer, but many are using them as home servers and such. Even a basic wireless camera feed can be a struggle for the zero so it's usecases are certainly limited, but its power to performance is great for its price.

[moooo99]

The zero is a cool device and I found some uses for it, but realistically it’s not at all comparable to the raspberry Pi people (used to) love

[craftkiller]

ARM needs more than just proper UEFI support: Microsoft needs to lift the secureboot restrictions on ARM.

x86: Microsoft requires that end-users are allowed to disable secure boot and control which keys are used.

arm: Microsoft requires that end-users are not allowed to disable secure boot

This isn't a hardware issue, but simply a policy issue that Microsoft could solve with a stroke of a pen, but since Microsoft is such a behemoth in the laptop space, their policies control the non-apple market.

source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html