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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

I can't shake the feeling that buying anything with Intel today is like buying already obsolete technology. Did I get myself too much under influence of advertisement etc. or is it valid to an extent? My laptop is currently 3 years old so I am looking for a replacement and it seems like there is no point to buy anything right now apart from M1 and AMD is out of stock everywhere. But even latest AMD processors are not that great of an upgrade. So I am left with M1, but I cannot support this company politics and my conclusion is that I am going to stick to my old laptop for a time being...

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3 years isn't that old. Unless someone else is footing it, keep using what works for you. The 14nm Intel laptops haven't changed much in that time.

Very small laptops with Intel Tigerlake are on level with AMD and Apple products. They have all the new IO bits (PCIe 4, LPDDR4x, Wifi6) and low power usage on 10nm.

If you wanted a bit more battery life, performance, or just want to try a fancier display upgrading could be nice.

I don't see Apple laptops having worse politics than other companies. On my iPad I feel the lots of problems of the closed ecosystem, but M1 laptops are accessable enough for developers to work with (even though it is sadly undocumented).

I still use a trusthy Asus bought in 2009, other than requiring additional fan under it, and a new battery, it is a perfectly working computer usable as desktop replacement for my coding activities.

We are long past the days of buying a new computer every couple of years.

You're basically right. Tiger Lake-H and Alder Lake should catch up to AMD this year though.

Alder Lake is still only 8+8 big+small cores, while you can already get 16 big cores in 5950X with hopefully Zen3 Threadrippers in the pipeline coming soon now that Milan is out. Feels like Intel has little to offer in competition.

Every time I see someone mention 5950x on HN or Twitter, I check Best Buy to see if it's in stock, and so far it has never been available. It could be the standout desktop chip in its market segment, but sellers are asking over a grand for it on Amazon. If the average PC builder takes price and availability into consideration when choosing a CPU, then those factors matter too.

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