Apple's M2 Ultra Seemingly Can't Beat AMD and Intel Rivals

> Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life.

I will happily be the one to tell you.

For between $600-700 you can get a gaming laptop from MSI, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and the like with a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU (e.g. i5 13420H), 8-16 GB of RAM, and a RTX 3050 or better, along with a 512GB-1TB SSD. Single-core performance is just shy of the M2, multi-core performance beats the M2, GPU performance is significantly better, and the only major shortfall is battery life.

As others have said, the M-series is great at power efficiency, but if performance is your only criteria there are significantly cheaper alternatives. Sure, you're going to have to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time and it will probably sound like a jet engine at times, however Apple is NOT the leader in value for performance as you believe.

Regarding battery life, you could approach Apple levels of usage time by undervolting your CPU. Depending on your configuration and hardware, you could gain a couple more hours of usage time by undervolting as well as using integrated graphics and disabling the GPU in favor of integrated graphics.

> Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price.

> You can't, because it doesn't exist.

Your tunnel vision is appalling. You're obviously not aware of what the market is offering.

From Apple, at $1000, you get an overly priced laptop with weak specs: 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM and an M1 CPU (which is weaker than a Core i5-1240P or Core i5-1335U), with no path to upgrade: https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m1/ That's essentially a mid-range tablet in a laptop form which is poised to become an e-waste in a few years.

You can get a laptop with such specs for around half of that price from virtually any vendor.

However, it's not just the base price: want 2TB storage? I can just get a Samsung Pro 990 2TB for $160-$170 an install it, but Apple won't allow you to do it and will charge you $800 for their soldered 2TB SSD. Want more RAM? You can get 64GB DDR5 for less than $150, whereas with Mac Book Air 16GB is the max you can get (which makes it is pretty useless for science or engineering applications, and 16GB RAM will probably become very limiting even for casual users in the near future) and it costs an extra $200.

I will also have the option to upgrade it to an 8TB (or 16TB by then, who knows) SSD and 96GB DDR5 when their prices come further down in the future, adding more to its life. I will also be able to easily replace the battery myself when the time comes. Whereas your option to upgrade will be to buy the brand new M6 or whatever Mac laptop, perhaps for another $2000 with hopefully half the RAM and SSD of what I will have.

Like most people who use laptop for work, 18 hours of battery life isn't addressing a real need that I have. People have mostly moved on to smart phones and tablets for watching video, casual browsing, etc in the absence of an electrical outlet. Nonetheless, for those who actually need such long battery life, it is possible to buy such laptops from other vendors for still half the price at those specs though (like Acer Swift 3 mentioned in another comment).

But nonetheless, you still feel you need to run to defend this company? It sounds like you've invested so much in Apple and just don't want to be wrong about it, even if it means living in a world of alternative facts in which any laptop that "remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor" for $1000 simply "doesn't exist".

I’d wait for real experiences to show up - GeekBench isn’t a great benchmark for pro work but it’s very accessible and people who get paid by ad impressions know there’s a big advantage to getting the story out first so we tend to see these things pretty reliably after new hardware comes out. Later, you’ll see stories from people who do real work but by then the attention will have dissipated.

Your fantastic statements about the potentials of Apple is bordering religion.

It's not just Apple, any big player can do what you said, but there are connectivity trade-offs in chiplet design. Its been open to any TSMC customer including AMD (which has been doing it well before Apple). Intel has also fabricated its own chiplet CPUs already and is currently sampling them.

> The M2 Ultra has a TDP of 60W. The i9-13900K has a base consumption of 125W, and draws up to 253W under stress.

What of it? RTX 4900 TDP is 600W. Just get a better PSU. It's a desktop computer that is always plugged to the wall, not a laptop on battery. It's irrelevant.

What people care about desktop computer is the performance/price and upgradability/serviceability. That's the math you need to do. In terms of what currently exists in the real world, with Apple, you get a CPU that is weaker than a 13900K or 7950X3D, with a soldered 128GB RAM and a soldered 4TB SSD for about $7000. I can build a stronger computer for less than $1500, and it will be both upgradable and serviceable. But the Apple device isn't going to pay the $5000+ difference with lower electrical bills any time during my lifetime: it will instead become a very expensive e-waste in less than 10 years.