Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years.
Apple's M1 came at a really interesting point. Intel was still dominating the laptop game for Windows laptops, but generational improvements felt pretty lame. A whole lot of money for mediocre performance gains, high heat output and not very impressive battery. The laptop ecosystem changed rapidly as not only the Apple M1 arrived, but also AMD started to gain real prominence in the laptop market after hitting pretty big in the desktop and data center CPU market. (Addendum: and FWIW, Intel has also gotten a fair bit better at mobile too in the meantime. Their recent mobile chipsets have shown good efficiency improvements.)
If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM lawsuit, I imagine a couple generations from now they could also have a fairly compelling product. In my eyes, there has never been a better time to buy a laptop.
(Obligatory: I do have an M2 laptop in my possession from work. The hardware is very nice, it beats the battery life on my AMD laptop even if the AMD laptop chews through some compute a bit faster. That said, I love the AMD laptop because it runs Linux really well. I've tried Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini, it is very cool but not something I'd consider daily driving soon.)
> Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years.
You say that, but I get extremely frustrated at how slow my Surface Pro 10 is (with an Ultra 7 165U).
It could be Windows of course, but this is a much more modern machine than my Macbook Air (M1) and feels like it's almost 10 years old at times in comparison. - despite being 3-4 years newer.
It's true that Linux may be a bit better in some cases, if you have a system that has good Linux support, but I think in most cases it should never make a very substantial difference. On some of the newer Intel laptops, there are still missing power management features anyways, so it's hard to compare.
That said, Intel still has yet to catch up to AMD on efficiency unfortunately, they've improved generationally but if you look at power efficiency benchmarks of Intel CPUs vs AMD you can see AMD comfortably owns the entire top of the chart. Also, as a many-time Microsoft Surface owner, I can also confirm that these devices are rarely good showcases for the chipsets inside of them: they tend to be constrained by both power and thermal limits. There are a lot of good laptops on the market, I wouldn't compare a MacBook, even a MacBook Air, a laptop, with a Surface Pro, a 2-in-1 device. Heck, even my Intel Surface Laptop 4, a device I kinda like, isn't the ideal showcase for its already mediocre 11th gen Intel processor...
The Mac laptop market is pretty easy: you buy the laptops they make, and you get what you get. On one hand, that means no need to worry about looking at reviews or comparisons, except to pick a model. They all perform reasonably well, the touchpad will always be good, the keyboard is alright. On the other hand, you really do get what you get: no touchscreens, no repairability, no booting directly into Windows, etc.
I changed the wording to be "booting directly" to clarify that I'm not including VMs. If I have to explain why that matters I guess I can, but I am pretty sure you know.
If the roles were reversed would you still need an explanation? e.g. If I could run macOS inside of a VM on Windows and run things like Final Cut and XCode with sufficient performance, would you think there's no benefit to being able to boot macOS natively?
Booting natively means you need real drivers, which don't exist for Windows on Mac as well as for macOS on PC. It'd be useless. Just use the VM, it's good.
And it's not the same - running Windows natively on Mac would seriously degrade the Mac, while running macOS on a PC has no reason to make it worse than with Windows. Why not buy a PC laptop at that point? The close hardware/OS integration is the whole point of the product. Putting Windows into a VM lets you use best of both.
The question was a hypothetical. What if the macOS VM was perfect? If it was perfect, would it then not matter if you couldn't just boot into macOS?
I'm pretty sure you would never use a Windows PC just to boot into a macOS VM, even if it was flawless. And there are people who would never boot a Mac, just to boot into a Windows VM, even if it was flawless. And no, it's not flawless. Being able to run a relatively old strategy game is not a great demonstration of the ability generally play any random Windows game. I have a Parallels and VMWware Fusion license (well... Had, anyway), and I'm a long time (20 years) Linux user, I promise that I am not talking out my ass when it comes to knowing all about the compromises of interoperability software.
To be clear, I am not trying to tell you that the interoperability software is useless, or that it doesn't work just fine for you. I'm trying to say that in a world where the marketshare of Windows is around 70%, a lot of people depend on software and workflows that only work on Windows. A lot of people buy PCs specifically to play video games, possibly even as a job (creating videos/streaming/competing in esports teams/developing video games and related software) and they don't want additional input latency, lower performance, and worse compatibility.
Even the imperfections of virtual machines aside, some people just don't like macOS. I don't like macOS or Windows at all. I think they are both irritating to use in a way that I find hard to stomach. That doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the existence of many people who very much rely on their macOS and Windows systems, the software ecosystems of their respective systems, and the workflows that they execute on those systems.
So basically, aside from the imperfections of a virtual machine, the ability to choose to run Windows as your native operating system is really important for the obvious case where it's the operating system you would prefer to run.
I agree. I would like to be able to use any hardware to it's full potential with any OS, even if the OS is running as a VM inside another OS. That's more difficult to pull off due to needing to then run both OSs at once. So then at least let me install the OS I want directly on the hardware and legally use any other OS in a VM with as much performance as possible.
There is nothing stopping you, technically or legally, from replacing the OS on a Mac. Apple went out of their way to make it possible (compared to devices with Qualcomm chips, for example) and the platform is reasonably compatible with PC.
The point of this whole thing is that practically speaking, it matters to the person deciding to buy a computer as to whether they can feasibly install their OS of choice on it. It stands to reason then, that a downside of buying a Mac computer is that you can not practically run Windows natively on a modern Mac. In practice, it does not matter who's fault this is.
Aside: Really, it's a combination of factors. First, Apple uses a bespoke boot chain, interrupt controller, etc. instead of UEFI and following ARM SystemReady standards like virtually all of the other desktop and server-class ARM machines, and didn't bother with any interoperability. The boot process is absolutely designed just to be able to boot XNU, with tiny escape hatches making it slightly easier to jam another payload into it. On the other hand, just out of pure coincidence, Windows apparently statically links the HAL since Windows 10 version 2004, making it impossible for a straight port to be done anymore. In any case, the Apple Silicon computers are designed to boot macOS, and "went out of their way to make it possible" is an absurd overstatement of what they did. What they did was "do the absolute minimum to make it possible without doing anything to make it strictly impossible." Going out of their way implies they actually made an effort to make it possible, but officially as far as I know Apple has only ever actually acknowledged virtual machines.
I think it would be fair to argue that the reverse is true, too: If you choose to buy a PC, you will be stuck with Windows, or an alternative PC operating system. (Of course, usually a Linux distribution, but sometimes a *BSD, or maybe Illumos. Or hell, perhaps Haiku.) That said, objectively speaking Windows has more marketshare and a larger ecosystem, for better or worse, so the number of people who strictly need and strictly want Windows is going to naturally be higher than the comparative numbers for macOS. This doesn't imply one is better than the other, but it still matters if you're talking about what laptop to buy.
> the platform is reasonably compatible with PC.
Not sure what you mean here. The Apple Silicon platform has basically nothing in common with the x64 PC. I guess it has a PCI express bus, but even that is not attached the same way as any typical x64 PC.
The Apple Silicon platform is actually substantially similar to the iOS platform.
> compared to devices with Qualcomm chips, for example
Also not sure what this is meant to mean, but with the Snapdragon X Elite platform, Qualcomm engineers have been working on upstream Linux support for a while now. In contrast I don't think Apple has contributed or even publicly acknowledged Asahi Linux or any of the Linux porting efforts to Apple Silicon.
If we're mostly concerned about CPU grunt, it's really hard to question the Ryzen 7040, which like the M1, is also not the newest generation chip, though it is newer than the M1 by a couple of years. Still, comparing an M1 MacBook Pro with a Framework 16 on Geekbench:
Both of these CPUs perform well enough that most users will not need to be concerned at all about the compute power. Newer CPUs are doing better but it'd be hard to notice day-to-day.
As for other laptop features... That'll obviously be vendor-dependent. The biggest advantage of the PC market is all of the choices you get to make, and the biggest disadvantage of the PC market is all of the choices you have to make. (Edit: Though if anyone wants a comparison point, just for sake of argument, I think generally the strongest options have been from ASUS. Right now, the Zephyrus G16 has been reviewing pretty good, with people mostly just complaining that it is too expensive. Certainly can't argue with that. Personally, I run Framework, but I don't really run the latest-and-greatest mobile chipsets most of the time, and I don't think Framework is ideal for people who want that.)
Ultimately it'll be subjective, but the fans don't really spin up on my Framework 16 unless I push things. Running a game or compiling on all cores for a while will do the trick. The exact battery life, thermals and noise will be heavily dependent on the laptop; the TDP of modern laptop CPUs is probably mostly pretty comparable so a lot of it will come down to thermal design. Same for battery life and noise, depends a lot on things other than the CPU.
Our Thinkpads are definitely hotter; fans spin up routinely on the Ryzens but never does on the M1. Battery life is infinitely better on the M1.
The other thing I hate about the Thinkpads is that the build/screen/trackpad quality sucks in comparison to the Apple stuff. And for all the griping about Mac OS on this site, Windows is way worse - you can tell MS's focus is on linux in the cloud these days. All the ancillary stuff Apple is good at is underappreciated.
I only do coding & browsing so maybe I'm a weak example but I find this even with my pretty old Intel laptops these days.
My Skylake one (I think that would be 6 years old now?) is doing absolutely fine. My Broadwell one is starting to feel a little aged but perfectly usable, I wouldn't even _consider_ upgrading it if I was in the bottom 95% of global income.
Compiling is very slow on these, but I think I'd avoid compilation on my laptop even if I had a cutting edge CPU?
Depends. I used to offload almost all compilation tasks, but now I only really do this if it's especially large. If I want to update my NixOS configuration I don't bother offloading it anymore. (NixOS isn't exactly Gentoo or anything, but I do have some overrides that necessitate a decent amount of compilation, mainly dogfooding my merge requests before they get merged/released.)
>Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks.
I've had my xps 13 since 2016. Really the only fault I have against it nowadays is that 8gb of ram is not sufficient to run intellij anymore (hell, sometimes it even bogs down my 16gb mbp).
Now, I've also built an absolute beast of a workstation with a 7800x3d, 64gb ram, 24 gb vram and a fast ssd. Is it faster than both? Yeah. Is my old xps slow enough to annoy me? Not really. Youtube has been sluggish to load / render here lately but I think that's much more that google is making changes to make firefox / ublock a worse experience than any fault of the laptop.
Regarding Youtube, Google is also waging a silent war against Invidious. It's to the point that even running helper scripts to trick Youtube isn't enough (yet). I can't imagine battling active and clever adversaries speeds up Youtube page loads as it runs through its myriad checks that block Invidious.
I am on Intel TGL currently and can't wait for Strix Halo next year. That is truly something else, it's nothing we have seen in notebooks before iGPU wise.
I've had a couple of Tiger Lake laptops, a Thinkpad and I believe my Surface Laptop 4. Based on my experience with current AMD mobile chipsets, I can only imagine the Strix Halo will be quite a massive uplift for you even if the generational improvements aren't impressive.
Apple's M1 came at a really interesting point. Intel was still dominating the laptop game for Windows laptops, but generational improvements felt pretty lame. A whole lot of money for mediocre performance gains, high heat output and not very impressive battery. The laptop ecosystem changed rapidly as not only the Apple M1 arrived, but also AMD started to gain real prominence in the laptop market after hitting pretty big in the desktop and data center CPU market. (Addendum: and FWIW, Intel has also gotten a fair bit better at mobile too in the meantime. Their recent mobile chipsets have shown good efficiency improvements.)
If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM lawsuit, I imagine a couple generations from now they could also have a fairly compelling product. In my eyes, there has never been a better time to buy a laptop.
(Obligatory: I do have an M2 laptop in my possession from work. The hardware is very nice, it beats the battery life on my AMD laptop even if the AMD laptop chews through some compute a bit faster. That said, I love the AMD laptop because it runs Linux really well. I've tried Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini, it is very cool but not something I'd consider daily driving soon.)