[jadenPete]

I really, really want an ARM laptop with great Linux support. It's very difficult to justify buying an non-M series laptop today, when the M series laptops outperform x86 laptops in battery life by such a wide margin. I'm sure some of that is because Apple controls their entire hardware and software stack and can optimize macOS for battery life, but it's hard not to believe that the processor architecture (i.e. x86) is mostly to blame for the terrible battery life of most laptops.

[babypuncher]

I think it's still up in the air whether a decent non-Apple laptop/desktop class ARM chip will come to market before Intel and/or AMD narrow the efficiency gap enough that the hassle won't be worth it.

[OJFord]

Who would make it? Do the likes of Broadcom have the vision & ambition to push into that class? I could see it happening if AMD decided Arm was the way to progress, but that would be bold too. (AMD does already have an architecture licence though I believe.)

[AuthAuth]

The M Series doesn't get battery life rep due to it being arm its purely due to Apple optimizing for battery life and partly marketing it a ton. You can get x86 chips that can do 24HR playing a video which is 5 hours more than the M2/M3 laptops and keep in mind thats running bloated ass windows which probably uses 2-3x the system resources of macOS. I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.

[pier25]

> I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.

No, not even close.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M4-review...

[AuthAuth]

I have extremely low trust in the methodology of that website. Just seeing the multi threaded benchmarks alone is enough to know they've cooked most of those tests on the snapdragon Elite machines. The Snapdragon chips came out before the M4 to compete vs the M3 which they won in almost every metric except single core. Since the X2 is soon to be released they appear very likely do that again.