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Comment by mikevm | Hacker News Reader

Looking at pure performance without power usage is meaningless for these machines.

Power usage doesn’t scale linearly, at all. Mobile Ryzens are very competitive with the M1 watt for watt (trading blows with Ryzen winning sometimes). Seems you’ve fallen for Apple marketing again.

What Ryzen laptop would you recommend with performance and battery life roughly equivalent to an M1 MacBook Air? A lot of people on HN obsess over benchmarks, but people buy laptops, not CPUs. I haven’t yet seen a product that’s competitive with the M1 MacBook Air in its niche (which to be fair isn’t really a niche - a laptop for what 90% of people use their laptops for).

I haven’t yet seen a product that’s competitive with the M1 MacBook Air in its niche

This is the inconvenient truth of these discussions. If anything, Apple is under playing the bang for the buck and performance per watt of these machines.

Im also curious. I run amd on the desktop w good results- but not seeing the air competition yet when I last looked when air came out

I am very Interested in a good mobile Windows/Ryzen laptop with a MacBook Air-comparable form factor, performance, and battery life. Please link if you know of one.

All the Intel machines I've looked into have fans and still manage to be 30-50% slower.

Me too. Let me know if you find one. If I was in the market for something like the MacBook Air, I’d definitely get the MacBook Air.

I’m fact I use an M1 iPad right now. It’s great. For browsing Facebook and video calls and doing remote work, it’s perfect. And for serious workloads, those go straight to my desktop workstation (AMD). Best of both worlds.

Ryzen is at a process disadvantage currently so Apple should be more efficient on average. When AMD gets on N5 (soon), it's going to be even more competitive.

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