Hacker News Reader

Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

I get 12+ hours of battery life on my M1 Air, no longer bother with cables and outlets at coffee shops.

What else I could buy of similar weight/size/battery/quality?

Even if knew of an alternative, there are other unexpected perks to going with Apple: travel constantly, occasionally selling my old one and switching to a new machine is easy whereas with other brands would be impossible. Amortized cost is less than $1/day.

If this Asahi thing pans out (I'm guessing maybe in a year or two it won't use twice the battery) I'll immediately dual boot and spend the majority of my time in it. :)

View on HN

This also happened when Macs transitioned to Intel and Core 2 Duo laptops were released. At the same price point, PCs were much noiser and had much poorer battery range.

ARM laptops from other brands are starting to pop up but they will take at least a year to catch up in terms of performance.

Right now, ThinkPad X13s runs Linux very decently, but it's less powerful than the M1.

In the US market it might be cheaper than M1 Mac Airs. In Europe it's 50% more expensive and customer support is poor.

Interesting product. 230g lighter with 10 hours longer battery life than an M1 Air.

> In Europe it's 50% more expensive

It's basically the same price in the UK. £84 more than an equivalent M1 Air on the Lenovo site right now.

That's a good price. In mainland EU, right now, the X13s is €1490 in lenovo.com. A MacBook Air M1 is €1200, and I can get almost 10% off using academic discount.

Plus, the Snapdragon CPU in the X13s is still far from the M1 in regular benchmarks. Linux support is better in the X13s, except for the camera. It's an IR one, and this might never be well supported.

There was ARM laptops before M1, nobody wanted them. M1 was ahead because it was 1 silicon node ahead for a year. The competition already caught back:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html

Yes, but not in terms of heat and battery. What fanless laptop do you suggest with similar specs to a MacBook Air M1?

The best think I have found that runs Linux reasonably well (still with lots of caveats) is the X13s. And I cannot get a decent price.

Heat and battery is directly tied to the performance per watt.

With equally performing software, the one with the best performance per watt will be run cooler and longer.

The graph I sent is not raw performance, but performance per watt.

Sure, but in practical terms are there any laptop makers that sell any CPU from that list, say a i3-1210U, in a good case and with good cooling?

Because, as I said in the original post, even when Apple was selling Core 2 Duos, their cooling was better than most other manufacturers. I was often buying Macs to run Linux because of this.

Also see what the parent post says about performance per Watt, which mirrors my experience as a user. No current x86_64 machine is close to ARM if you want low heat.

Nobody wanted an arm laptop because it doesn't run windows/existing software. Apple bundles an is and a decent emulator for old software. If they didn't nobody would want it.

There was ARM surface laptops existing before M1 macs. It run existing software except x64 apps sadly. Windows phone, was windown on ARM.

People didn't liked ARM windows laptop, first because the performance was crap, then because the poor compatibility.

That comparison chart is not very accurate. The Core i7-1250U CPUMark score of 13453 is at 29W (TDP up), not 9W (TDP down), so the performance per watt ratio they're using is inaccurate. Also, if you look at the CPUMark score distributions, you see a bimodal distribution because it mixes the 10 W (MacBook air) and 15W (MacBook Pro) configurations.

The 10W (MacBook Air) variant of the M1 achieves a median CPUMark score of ~14500. That's a lot better than the Intel CPU's 13453 at 29W. Now, if you limit the Intel CPU to a lower TDP by underclocking, the performance per watt can improve substantially (since the efficiency plummets when going for peak clock speeds), but it's still considerably behind the M1.

10W is the typical TDP, not the max TDP of the M1 chip. AFAIK M1 chip does not specify max TDP, which can go higher than the max TDP listed than the i7.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

> This also happened when Macs transitioned to Intel and Core 2 Duo laptops were released. At the same price point, PCs were much noiser and had much poorer battery range.

I had one of those macbooks… very silent but the fan broke quite soon and to use it I had to limit the cpu frequency or it would overheat and shut down.

I take the noise over the sleek computer with the air intake and outtake placed in the same hole that overheats constantly.

The machine was completely unusable in the summer, the bottom would get scorching hot. I could NOT place it on my legs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com