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by thewebguyd 269 days ago
> The reduced horsepower relative to M-series isn't a problem for me as much as efficiency is

Same here. I actually don't care for macOS much, and I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes Windows (with WSL).

I tried the surface laptop 7 with the snapdragon X elite, and it's..OK. Still spins up the fans quite a bit and runs hotter than my 14" M4 Pro. It's noticeably slower than the MacBook too, and isn't instant wake from sleep (though it's a lot better than Wintel laptops used to be).

So I've been on Apple Silicon macs for the last 4.5 years because there's just no other option out there that even comes close. I'm actually away from my desk a lot, battery life matters to me. I just want a laptop with great performance AND great battery life, silent, runs cool, high quality screen and touchpad, and decent speakers and microphone.

MacBooks are literally the only computer on the market that checks all boxes. Even if I wanted to/preferred to run Windows or Linux instead, I can't because there just isn't equivalent hardware out there.

1 comments

It’s even worse: Parallels on MacBooks runs windows better than a dedicated windows laptop…
Before the Macbook ARM switch, from 2015 onwards I used to run Linux via Parallels and it ran better than any Linux I ever used on a natively on a modern laptop. After installing the parallel tools you had 2D/3D/video acceleration, clipboard sharing, Wifi/Ethernet bridging, and most importantly - seemless and stable suspend/resume.
And if you don’t want to pay a subscription, VMWare also breaks no sweat since a long time ago, and it’s very polished at this point.

I recently tried VirtualBox and it’s finally catching up, seems to work without any problems but I didn’t test it enough to find out the quirks.

VMWare's desktop hypervisors were announced to be free to use a little while ago:

* https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...

You need to register an account/e-mail address for a free account:

* https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumbe...

After which you can download VMware Fusion Pro and/or VMware Workstation Pro:

* https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/368667/downl...

This seems to be a perpetual licence (?), so as long as it can run on the underlying OS you can continue to use it. Not sure if there's any 'phone home' functionality to track things (like has been seen with Oracle VirtualBox).

I doubt that's true except for in your mind. What are you comparing it to? And old-ass Windows laptop?
I moved from a lenovo thinkpad p1 gen 2 core i9 32Gb (2020) to a macbook pro m1 max 32gb (2021), and the experience in parallels beats the experience in the lenovo machine.