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Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

The single-thread performance of the M1 doesn't get close to the competition at its power level, even a year after its release. [0] The top item in the list is the M1, a 10W CPU. The second is an Intel requiring 125W. The highest-scoring i5 also requires 125W, and is 15th in the list.

Just a reminder that the M1 MacBook Air has no fan, and is still at the top.

When choosing a laptop you of course look are more factors than just performance, but for many, that alone will be an extremely important consideration. Not to mention that - incredibly - there isn't even a conventional battery life tradeoff for that top performance. In that sense, the M1 is a no-brainer.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

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M1 does beat every other laptop processor atm in single core speed, but the latest Ryzen 5X00U (and 4800U) are better in multithreaded perf (both absolute and per watt) - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html. Hopefully the Framework Laptop offers mainboard upgrades with these at some point.

I very nearly bought an M1 Macbook, but realized I didn't want to live with currently early stage linux compatibility. I'm still thinking of buying an M1 mac mini as a little home server though - that tiny power consumption combined with such good CPU performance is perfect for that use case (although it would be nice if I could somehow attach a bunch of hot swap HDD bays to a mac mini too).

To me the M1 one is the differentiator not even because of its performance, but because of what it allows the laptop to be: Absolute silence with 20 hour battery life. To have it also be screamingly fast is very nice to have though.

You forget the computer is there! I have been so overwhelmingly happy with my M1 (with RAM upgrade) as a dev machine. It's THAT good. My co-workers cry when they see how fast my docker containers build.

I wish I felt like this about the M1 that work got me. I have a list of issues but the best indictment of how bad it is is:

- a typescript React recompile causes music playing to buffer for a couple of seconds.

I wanted to love it but I much prefer my mid level Intel based MacBook Pro

That's very odd, I compile a TypeScript react project practically all day while I'm working on it and haven't noticed anything. Could be legitimately faulty if you're seeing a load of issues.

I compile React frequently in a docker container on my M1 MacBook Air and I, similarly to the other commenter, get no such problems.

Would love to get some feedback on M1 for development.

I am used to work in Linux OS VM(Virtualbox and Vagrant in MacOS) and do most PHP/Python web development. It seems that Virtualbox won't be supported and There is only one Linux VM option available [UTM](https://github.com/utmapp/UTM)

I would hate to invest too much time for a new dev environment just for M1. How's your experience?

Performance of the M1 is indeed impressive, and I don't mean to imply that these CPUs all perform relatively the same. But I have a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro with an i5, and it does everything I need a laptop to do: take notes, browse the web, and do some light programming and gaming (e.g. Minecraft at 60 FPS). It also runs x86 programs directly rather than through an emulation layer (though this will become less and less of a problem as time goes on).

I have thought a little about this: It is not _that_ much better than the last gen ryzens. How much of that is because apple bought more or less all of TSMCs 5nm process?

> the M1 is a no-brainer

I don't use MacOS, is it still a no-brainer?

Yes, it’s a no-brainer for you to not choose it.

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