[jeroenhd]

amd64 definitely beats any aarch64 when it comes to performance, but the trick Apple (and if proper Linux driver support ever lands, Qualcomm) pull is that they get 80% of amd64 performance at 25% of the battery cost.

Not a lot of people are running intensive calculations all day. My day-to-day usage is 90% thinking/planning/writing/reviewing code and maybe 10% of time spent on running that software.

There are two factors that blow up Apple's aarch64 chips above the competition: false comparisons ($1000 cobbled-togerher PCs versus $3000 Macbooks) and Enterprise Hardware vendors like Dell and Lenovo raising their prices to match Apple's without the hardware or software to match (i.e. $2000 Thinkpad workstation laptops that are slow, overheat, and draw huge amounts of power, but are priced as "workstations" because they have a GPU with fp64 support).

For the people who spend a lot of money on a computer for the first time, Apple's aarch64 chips are more likely to be a good deal than the treacherous landscape of high-end laptops and prebuilts. Even in Apple's price, competing range vendors still dare sell 1080p60 displays. Buying desktop/workstation units, 10gbps ports seem to be made of solid gold and actual, full-speed Thunderbolt/USB4 support is restricted to one specific port, often placed at an inconvenient location.

You can exceed Apple's performance in general and their performance-per-dollar as well, but it requires time and attention to look through marketing bullshits and hidden-away spec sheets. That's especially the case now that every store page has four popups about "AI" and "NPU" and "Copilot" for some absurd reason.