Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, the MBP is fulfilling Apple's design goals: they are optimizing for thinness, lightness, and battery life, not performance or thermal dissipation. As long as the thing doesn't break (in a way that can't be fixed trivially by the Geniuses at the Genius Bar) everything's fine as far as Apple's business is concerned.

View on HN

But if you charge people for a CPU that has been modified or set up so it cannot achieve the advertised specs then it is misselling.

Intel's CPUs are likely not modified (very much). All Intel CPUs automatically downclock themselves when they start to overheat as a self-protection measure.

It is up to the case-manufacturer to provide adequate fans and cooling for the chip. Otherwise, Intel's chips are forced to protect themselves and start to slow themself down.

Last i had heard, TDP was a manufacturer configurable item and could be set within a pretty wide range, and the limits would act accordingly

This seems the same as someone selling you a 4K monitor (for 50% more than other 4K monitors) without ever mentioning that you can only actually have 4K for 5 min max, otherwise it's QHD. It sure sounds like something that should be illegal to me...

I like how you note the customer needs have no role in the Apple design process.

The fact that Apple is the most successful company in the world seems to suggest that their method of thrilling the customer by subverting and surpassing their expectations beats building what the customer says they want. In the case of laptops, it turns out that lightness and battery life -- portability -- is what people actually want, otherwise they'd just use desktops.

I’d guess the software, as that’s the primary distinguishing factor. I don’t know of anyone who runs windows on a mac, even though that’s relatively easy. However, there’s a thriving hackintosh community.

It’d be easier to tell if Apple offered consumers choice themselves.

> otherwise they'd just use desktops

That's not an option for many. If you use a desktop machine in your office, you can't ever work from home, and you can't carry your machine into meetings to demo something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com