[roomey]

Genuine question, when people talk about apple silicon being fast, is the comparison to windows intel laptops, or Mac intel architecture?

Because, when running a Linux intel laptop, even with crowd strike and a LOT of corporate ware, there is no slowness.

When blogs talk about "fast" like this I always assumed it was for heavy lifting, such as video editing or AI stuff, not just day to day regular stuff.

I'm confused, is there a speed difference in day to day corporate work between new Macs and new Linux laptops?

Thank you

[nerdsniper]

I use pretty much all platforms and architectures as my "daily drivers" - x64, Apple Silicon, and ARM Cortex, with various mixtures of Linux/Mac/Windows.

When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in performance, and battery life is more variable now.

Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU, GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher memory bandwidth/lower latency.

I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's competitive in the latest generation.

[Philip-J-Fry]

This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever.

My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.

I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.

[nerdsniper]

My work MBP also can drain the battery in a couple hours of light use. But that's because of FireEye / Microsoft Defender. FireEye has a bug where it pegs the CPU at 100% indefinitely and needs to be killed to stop its infinite loop. Defender hates when a git checkout changes 30,000 files and uses up all my battery (but I can't monitor this because I can't view the processes).

[a012]

It’s always the corporate wares that caused the issues, in my case it’s crowdstrike and zscaler. Even with these wares I can last a full day with my M1 pro, I only notice the battery was drained to 0 once when I went to vacation for a week, it’s never happened before these wares

[Arbortheus]

I also have to run Defender on my MacBook at work.

If you have access to the Defender settings, I found it to be much better after setting an exclusion for the folder that you clone your git repositories to. You can also set exclusions for the git binary and your IDE.

[nerdsniper]

I have friendly management. I might ask them to exclude my folder full of git repos. Thank you. (No access on my end)

[kergonath]

I didn’t even know Microsoft Defender was a thing on MBPs.

[ufmace]

Have you checked whether the work laptop's bad battery life is due to the OS, or due to the mountain of crapware security and monitoring stuff that many corporations put on all their computers?

I currently have a M3 Pro for a work laptop. The performance is fine, but the battery life is not particularly impressive. It often hits low battery after just 2-3 hours without me doing anything particularly CPU-intensive, and sometimes drains the battery from full to flat while sitting closed in a backpack overnight. I'm pretty sure this is due to the corporate crapware, not any issues with Apple's OS, though it's difficult to prove.

I've tended to think lately that all of the OSes are basically fine when set up reasonably well, but can be brought to their knees by a sufficient amount of low-quality corporate crapware.

[mschuster91]

Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.

That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...

[zozbot234]

> Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage.

Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no other OS can manage today.

[int_19h]

Battery life is poor though.

[LtdJorge]

Hmm, for most desktop stuff, you're still limited to random access, where even if leagues above HDD, the NVMe still suck compared to sequential. It's sad that intel killed Optane/3D X-point, because those are mych better at random workloads and they had still lower latencies than the latest NVMe (not by much anymore).

[zozbot234]

I don't understand why Optane hasn't been revived already for modern AI datacenter workloads. Being able to augment and largely replace system RAM across the board with something cheaper (though not as cheap as NAND, and more power-hungry too) ought to be a huge plus, even if the technology isn't suitable for replacing HBM or VRAM due to bulk/power constraints.

[LtdJorge]

It’s also tremendously durable, NAND doesn’t get close in write endurance.

[mschuster91]

Thing is, with Apple, even the bottom of the barrel entry devices (aka MBAs) get the high performance storage.

With Windows, you're probably still getting SATA and not even NVMe.

[wtallis]

Windows laptops have been pretty much exclusively NVMe for years. The 2.5" SATA form factor was a waste of space that laptop OEMs were very happy to be rid of, first with mSATA then with M.2 using SATA or NVMe. NVMe finished displacing SATA years ago, when the widespread availability of hardware supporting the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature meant that entry-level NVMe SSDs could be both faster and cheaper than the good SATA SSDs. Most of the major SSD vendors discontinued their M.2 SATA SSDs long ago, indicating that demand for that product segment had collapsed.

[smw]

Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop pcs.

[drob518]

My M1 MacBook Air is honestly the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Still snappy and responsive years after release. Fantastic machine. But I’m starting to crave an M5 Air…

[xandrius]

Don't let consumerism be stronger than you. An m1 is still sufficiently powerful.

[drob518]

I appreciate your helping to strengthen my resolve. More importantly, my wife thanks you as well. That said, the increased RAM available on the new models is really what I want. I have lots of programs open simultaneously.

[whatevermom3]

You deserve an upgrade! You worked so hard for it :)

Happiness #1

[socalgal2]

I'm on an M1. I talk myself out of upgrading by remembering that I after a few hours of happiness my actual day-to-day experience won't noticably change.

[eru]

Of course, it's only competitive for short bursts of serious CPU work. The thermal limits do kick in pretty quickly.

(I love my MacBook Air, but it does have its limits.)

[nerdsniper]

I looked into this for the M1 MBA and it had the exact same performance at full load as the MBP...for 7 minutes. Then the thermal throttling hits and it slows down. I'm not sure what the time limit is for newer models. Regardless, the MBA's aren't offered with Pro/Ultra chips, which I desire (and would thermally throttle much sooner than 7 minutes).

My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is entirely based on whether they do anything that will load the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a lot.

0: https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

[testing22321]

I edit tons of raw images and 4K video like it’s going out of style.

My used M1 mba is the fastest computer I’ve ever used. If a video render is going to take more than 7 minutes I walk away or just do something in another app anyway. The difference of a few mini means nothing.

[giantrobot]

I've got a cheap laptop stand with built-in fans that blow against the bottom case of my MBA. With my previous M1 and current M3 the stand keeps them from thermal throttling for longer periods. Most of the time it's completely unnecessary but I use it occasionally when doing long duration compiles or other long term heavy loads. Even without using the stand the tasks would complete in a reasonable amount of time, it just gives me a few extra minutes of "full blast" which is often all I need.

[eru]

I guess the details depend on how warm it is in your room, and whether your MacBook Air sits directly under a fan.

[wincy]

I’ve been amazed that while it absolutely uses a ton of battery, so has to be plugged in, my kid is able to play 3D online games with me using my old M1 MacBook Air. Not top of the line stuff (and had to change the resolution to 1440x900), but still. It gets hot, but doesn’t thermal throttle. I had half expected it to start throttling but we played for 3 hours last night with no issues.

What’s surprising is it DOES throttle using Discord with video after an hour or so, unless the battery is already full (I’m guessing it tries to charge which generates a lot of heat). You get way less thermals with a full battery and it using power instead of discharging/charging the battery during heavy usage.

[robertoandred]

Fortunately, short CPU bursts are most of what most people do. Race to idle!

[ahepp]

what are you doing where you find the thermal limits noticeable?

[jsheard]

Apple chips are very good especially for their power envelope but let's not get ahead of ourselves, the only way a Macbook Air feels competitive with a top-of-the-line desktop is if you're not actually utilizing the full sustained power of the desktop. There's a reason why Apple sells much bigger Max/Ultra chips with active cooling.

[freeone3000]

It’s still a lot less active cooling - the MBP fan and fan noise is noticably less than every thinkpad I’ve had, and its perf beats most desktop i7s.

[throwa356262]

First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.

Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch of design and manufacturing choices.

But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same hardware.

[nerdsniper]

I do believe Apple are still the fastest single-core (M5, A19 Pro, and M3 Ultra leading), which still matters for a shocking amount of my workloads. But only the M5 has any noticeable gap vs Intel (~16%). Also the rankings are a bit gamed because AMD and Intel put out a LOT of SKU's that are nearly the same product, so whenever they're "winning" on a benchmark they take up a bunch of slots right next to eachother even though they're all basically the exact same chip.

Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload still apply, of course.

And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor, but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in multicore benchmarks.

[deaddodo]

No, the AMD headliners still dominate for single-core performance[1]. Even if you normalize for similar/"same" chips; which really just means you have five cores each generation: AMD's, Intel's, Apple's, and ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-X.

Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.

But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.

1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-benchmarks-2026/

[nerdsniper]

I can't find which benchmarks those scores are from. It looks like sometimes they might have been comparing gaming FPS to AMDs paired with Nvidia 5090's? Something feels off about the site you linked - the methodology and scores aren't even cursorily explained, and gaming scores don't make sense. The 5600X doesn't even have an iGPU and the GFX card they had to have paired with it isn't listed.

What does "single core gaming performance" even mean for a CPU that doesn't have an iGPU? How could that not be a category error to compare against Apple Silicon?

I was looking at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

See also:

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

[fluoridation]

>What does "single core gaming performance" even mean for a CPU that doesn't have an iGPU?

Just a guess, but I would interpret it to mean how fast the CPU can issue commands to the GPU (which is usually, though not always, done in a single thread). For example, that could be measured by choosing a graphically lightweight game at minimum settings together with the best possible GPU and measuring the framerate. I.e. Making sure the bottleneck is the CPU, how high does the framerate go?

Whether the package includes a GPU or not is irrelevant, because what is being compared is the CPU part of the package, not the GPU. Whether they both happen to live within the same package or even the same die is irrelevant.

[throwa356262]

Even at the time of announcement M5 was not the fastest chip. Not even on single core benchmark where apple usually shines due to the design choice of having fewer but more powerful cores (AMD for examples does the opposite). For example on geekbench Core i9-14900KS and Core Ultra 9 285K were faster.

The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.

[nerdsniper]

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

Apple leads all of these in single core, by a significant margin. Even at geekbench.com (3398 for AMD 9950X3D vs 3235 for the 14900KS vs ~4000 for various Apple chips)

I'm not sure I could find a single core benchmark it would lose no matter how hard I tried...

[ajross]

> First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest.

The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.

At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].

But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.

[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.

[drob518]

For laptops at least, I appreciate not having fans that sound like a helicopter. I guess for Mac Mini and Mac Studio having more fan noise is acceptable (maybe a switch would be nice). One of the things that I love about my Air is there is zero fan noise all the time. Yes, it throttles, and 99% of the time I don’t notice and don’t care. Yes, I know there are workloads where it would be very noticeable and I would care, but I don’t personally run too many CPU bound tasks.

[zozbot234]

Bigger fans can move a lot more air while being less noisy, so if you care about a silent profile for any given amount of work the Mac Studio (or the Mac Mini if you don't need the full power of a Studio) is the best choice.

[TiredOfLife]

There is no non Apple desktop/server cpu with faster single core than apple m5 or even m4

[cosmic_cheese]

Same. It’s always disappointing when otherwise promising competing laptops turn out to be considerably more noisy if you’re doing anything more intense than using MS Paint.

It’s probably the single most common corner to cut in x86 laptops. Manufacturers love to shove hot chips into a chassis too thin for them and then toss in whatever cheap tiny-whiny-fan cooling solution they happen to have on hand. Result: laptop sounds like a jet engine when the CPU is being pushed.

[benjiro]

Even something like MS Paint can turn a laptop in to a aircraft.

The issue is actually very simple. In order to gain more performance, manufactures like AMD / Intel for a long time have been in a race for the highest frequency but if you have some knowhow in hardware, you know that higher frequency = more power draw the higher you clock.

So you open your MS Paint, and ... your CPU pushes to 5.2Ghz, and it gets fed 15W on a single core. This creates a heat spike in the sensors, and your fans on laptops, all too often are set to react very fast. And VROOOOEEEEM goes your fan as the CPU Temp sensor hits 80C on a single core, just for a second. But wait, your MS Paint is open, and down goes the fan. And repeat, repeat, repeat ...

Notice how Apple focused on running their CPUs no higher then 4.2Ghz or something... So even if their CPU boosts to 100%, that thermal peak will be maybe 7W.

Now combine that with Apple using a much more tolerant fan / temp sensor setup. They say: 100C is perfectly acceptable. So when your CPU boosts, its not dumping 15W, but only 7W. And because the fan reaction threshold is so high, the fans do not react on any Apple product. Unless you run a single or MT process for a LONG time.

And even then, the fans will only ramp up slowly if your 100C has been going on for a few seconds, and while yes, your CPU will be thermal throttling while the fans spin up. But you do not feel this effect.

That is the real magic of Apple. Yes, their CPUs are masterpieces at how they get so much performance from a lower frequency, but the real kicker is their thermal / fan profile design.

The wife has a old Apple clone laptop from 2018. Thing is for 99.9% of the time silent. No fans, nothing. Because Xiaomi used the same tricks on that laptop, allowing it to boost to the max, without triggering the fan ramping. And when it triggers with a long running process, they use a very low fan rpm until it goes way too high. I had laptops with the same CPU from other brands in the same time periode, and they all had annoying fan profiles. That showed me that a lot of Apple magic is good design around the hardware/software/fan.

But ironically, that magic has been forgotten in later models by Xiaomi ... Tsk!

Manufactures think: Its better if millions of people suffer from more noise, then if we need to have a few thousand laptops that die / get damaged, from too much heat. So ramp up the fans!!!

[cosmic_cheese]

And as a cherry on top, Apple uses custom fans designed to emit noise in less annoying frequencies and when multiple fans are in play, slightly varies their speeds to avoid harmonizing. So even when they do run, they're not perceived as being as loud at most speeds.

[ajross]

This seems like intuition fed from 8+ years ago and a HN culture of mac fetishism. It's just not like that. You can find some loud gaming laptops. And sure, occasionally there's an individual device with outlier fan behavior. But really the PC laptop world is pretty calm and boring these days. No, nothing goes "VROOOOEEEM". Chromebooks are even better.

[zozbot234]

You can mostly fix this by running your CPU in "battery saving" mode. CPUs should basically never boost to the 5GHz+ range unless they're doing something that's absolutely latency-critical. It's a huge waste of energy for a negligible increase in performance.

[saagarjha]

> Notice how Apple focused on running their CPUs no higher then 4.2Ghz or something... So even if their CPU boosts to 100%, that thermal peak will be maybe 7W.

If you max out your processor it will be more than happy to draw 20W+

[drob518]

Exactly. They shoot for the highest benchmark score and build something annoying to use on a daily basis.

[gpderetta]

It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.

Of course Apple did pick a very good sweet spot favoring a wide core as opposed to a speed daemon more than the competition.

[ajross]

> It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.

That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive. In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider architecture is actually faster than the competition in an absolute sense even at the deployed clock rates. There's really no significant market where you'd want to use anything different for CPU compute anywhere. Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or Zen 5c every time they're measured too.

Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are die size and packaging: their cores take a little more area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings with much higher per-part margins.

Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple to do the same soon.

[1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs are fast enough and have been for years now, and the stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized out of its market space, but then that's true of every premium vendor throughout history.

[gpderetta]

Oh. Apple won this and the last few rounds for sure. They definitely picked the right microarchitecture and delivered masterfully.

Early on personally I had doubts they could scale their CPU to high end desktop performance, but obviously it hasn't been an issue.

My nitpick was purely about using clock per cycle as a performance metric, which is as much nonsense as comparing GHz: AFAIK Apple cpus still top at 4.5 GHz, while the AMD/Intel reach 6Ghz, so obviously the architectures are optimized for different target frequencies (which makes sense: the power costs of a high GHz design are astronomical).

And as an microarchitecture nerd I'm definitely interested in how they can implement such a wide architecture, but wide-ness per-se is not a target.

[socalgal2]

What fast image / video gen software is available for Mac? I'm jealous of my friends with 4090s and 5090s

[llm_nerd]

I don't get your first line. When people talk about Apple's core speeds they're not talking about cycles per instruction or something, they're talking about single-thread performance on a benchmark like Geekbench. Geekbench runs various real-world code and it's the gross throughput that is measured, and it's there that Apple cores shine.

[rahkiin]

My windows with corporate crap is sometimes 2000x slower than without corporate crap. And consistently 10x slower than an M3

[indemnity]

Don’t worry, my new M4 doesn’t feel much faster either due to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got ported to Mac it’s become terrible in I/O and overall responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire core or two on Defender processes.

My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.

[PaulHoule]

I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now: beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… Reminds me of the bad old days of Win XP.

[nerdsniper]

How much RAM do you have? That seems to be the main thing that slows down my MacBooks (original launch-day 16GB M1 MBP and 32 GB M2 Pro). The M1 CPU is finally starting to show its age for some things, but the M2 Pro is really only RAM limited in perceived speed for me.

[drob518]

RAM. You must have 16 GB or more. And for serious work now, I’m looking at 32 GB or more.

[leptons]

I haven't had a laptop with less than 32GB of RAM in about 15 years. RAM is extremely useful for some workloads.

[PaulHoule]

Mine has 48GB.

[astrange]

You can report a bug by typing applefeedback:// in Safari.

[leptons]

Those sound like very well tested numbers, founded in reality /s

[rahkiin]

I did. On equal hardware, in same order, with same windows version, on clean installs. ‘npm install’ is very file-heavy and Windows with corpware hates small files especially with the .js extension

[llm_nerd]

Nowhere in the submission or even the comment you replied to did anyone say "fastest". The incredibly weird knee-jerk defensiveness by some is bizarre.

It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying background needs, in this case talking specifically about Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same reason.

[vachina]

My RHEL vnc feels snappier than the Windows 11 client it’s running on.

With maximum corporate spyware it consistently takes 1 second to get a visual feedback on Windows.

[ksec]

>First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.

You are comparing 256 AMD Zen6c Core to What? M4 Max?

When people say CPU they meant CPU Core, And in terms of Raw Speed, Apple CPU holds the fastest single core CPU benchmarks.

[throwa356262]

M4 pro 16 cores is #13 among laptops:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html#cpumark

[indemnity]

You’re still looking at the multi core score, you want this one:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next MacBook Air) is on top.

When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core charts will be interesting.

[ksec]

Thank You. I sometimes felt discussing anything Hardware on HN is hopeless.

[rngfnby]

New Mac arm user here.

Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb).

Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba mount through our corporate VPN.

- Much faster than my intel Mac

- Faster than my Windows

- Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but with my current job I no longer get to use them much for desktop (unfortunately).

Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just sleeps/wakes up with no problems.

The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery, decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer keypress)

[bstar77]

Part of it is that the data pipelines in the Mac are far more efficient with its soldered memory and enhanced buses. You would have to use something like Halo Strix on the PC side see similar performance upticks at a somewhat affordable price bracket. Things like Samba/VPN mounting should not matter much (unless your mac network interface is significantly better), but you might see a general snappiness improvement. Heavy compute tasks will be a give and take with modern PC hardware, but Apple is still the king of efficiency.

I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with virtually no compromises.

[irae]

I've used Linux as a daily driver for 6 months and I am now back to my M1 Max for the past month.

I didn't find any reply mentioning the easy of use, benefits and handy things the mac does and Linux won't. Spotlight, Photos app with all the face recognition and general image index, contact sync, etc. Takes ages to setup those on Linux and with macs everything just works with an Apple account. So I wonder if Linux had to do all this background stuff, if it would be able to run smoothly as Macs run this days.

For context: I was running Linux for 6 months for the first time in 10 years (which I was daily driving macs). My M1 Max still beats my full tower gaming PC, which I was using linux at. I've used Windows and Linux before, and Windows for gaming too. My Linux setup was very snappy without any corporate stuff. But my office was getting warm because of the PC. My M1 barely turn on the fans, even with large DB migrations and other heavy operation during software development.

[dangus]

I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop review coverage before asking questions like this.

There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions.

Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.

Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.

Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.

[testdelacc1]

I haven’t used a laptop other than a mac in 10 years. I remember being extremely frustrated with the Intel macs. What I hated most was getting into video meetings, which would make the Intel CPU sound like a 747 taxiing.

The switch from a top spec, new Intel Mac to a base model M1 Macbook Air was like a breath of fresh air. I still use that 5 year old laptop happily because it was such a leap forward in performance. I dont recall ever being happy with a 5 year old device.

[ahepp]

I think you're bringing up a great question here. If you ask a random person on the street "is your laptop fast", the answer probably has more to do with what software that person is running, than what hardware.

My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid and the battery lasts forever.

[bluedino]

Somehow my 2011 MacBook Pro was the fastest laptop I had ever used.

After I put an SSD in it, that is.

I wonder what my Apple silicon laptop is even doing sometimes.

[newsclues]

Power management with Mac’s is the big benefit, imo.

It’s all about the perf per watt.

[cj]

For me it’s things like boot speed. How long does it take to restart the computer. To log out, and log back in with all my apps opening.

Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic functions. (I don’t have real data points)

Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and always responsive.

No idea how that compares to Linux.

[nerdsniper]

Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.

[spockz]

It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in. However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app, immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open Firefox it opens instantly.

Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded.

On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly.

Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.

[jghn]

> For me it’s things like boot speed

This is a metric I never really understood. how often are people booting? The only time I ever reboot a machine is if I have to. For instance the laptop I'm on right now has an uptime of just under 100 days.

[maccard]

My Mac - couldn’t tell you, I just close the lid. My work laptop? Probably every day, as it makes its own mind up what it does when you close the lid. Even the “shut down” button in the start menu often restarts the machine in win 11.

My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for things like Docker to decide that they’ve actually started up.

[n8cpdx]

Back in the bad old days of Intel Macs, I had a full system crash just as I was about to get up to give a presentation in class.

It rebooted and got to desktop, restoring all my open windows and app state, before I got to the podium (it was a very small room).

The Mac OS itself seems to be relatively fast to boot, the desktop environment does a good job recovering from failures, and now the underlying hardware is screaming fast.

I should never have to reboot, but in the rare instances when it happens, being fast can be a difference maker.

[eru]

Well, completely rebooting is a lot slower on my Macs than on my Linux.

But I'm running a fairly slim Archlinux install without a desktop environment or anything like that. (It's just XMonad as a window manager.)

[indemnity]

What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.

[nottorp]

Hmm? Why do you restart your computer often enough to notice?

Even Windows (or at least my install that doesn't have any crap besides visual studio on it) can run for weeks these days...

[maccard]

My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to sleep and just run its battery to 0.

My work PC will decide to not idle and will spin up fans arbitrarily in the evenings so I shut it down when I’m not using it.

[nottorp]

> My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to sleep and just run its battery to 0.

That reminds me that if Apple annoys me enough to switch back to linux at my main OS it will hurt on laptops :(

[throwa356262]

Some of that can be attributed to faster IO.

Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered.

Why? I have no idea.

[ahepp]

My guess would be that ARM Chromebooks might run substantially more cut-down firmware? While intel might need a more full-fat EFI stack? But I haven't used either and am just speculating.

[lrem]

You can notice that memory bandwidth advantage even in workloads like photo editing and code compilation. That and the performance cores reserved for foreground compute, on top of the usual "Linux sucks at swap" (was it fixed? I haven't enabled swap on my Linux machines for ages by now), does make a day-to-day difference in my usage.

[qoez]

I love apple and mainly use one for personal use, but apple users consistently overrate how fast their machines are. I used to see sentiment like "how will nvidia ever catch up with apples unified silicon approach" a few years ago. But if you just try nvidia vs apple and compare on a per dollar level, nvidia is so obviously the winner.

[maccard]

For day to day use, my base spec M1 MacBook Pro is snappier than my i9 desktop with 128GB of ram and a 4090.