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Comment by Miraste | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these are symptoms of the root cause: a bad product. Ultrabooks aren't a terrible concept; they're the Wintel version of Macbook Airs. Making a non-Apple Apple device is a fine business strategy, and Samsung has made plenty of money off of it. The problem was that Intel chips continually crippled them, making them hot and slow with no battery life. People don't like Celerons and iGPUs because they all run at the speed of molasses.

Any of these branding decisions would have worked fine, if the products did. But no amount of marketing will fix bad engineering.

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I don't think I agree at all with your assertions about ultrabooks and blaming intel CPUs.

To be honest, all x86 processors are reasonably efficient if you pick the right power points to run them at. My experience with my laptops is that windows will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason. There is no reason for a CPU to be running higher than idle the vast majority of the time in a laptop, for tasks that you would be using a laptop for on battery.

I think most laptops are just poorly designed and Windows isn't reliable about using minimal power. MFGs make big laptops with 60whr batteries (instead of 100wh), they put bloatware on them that consume excess power at idle, MS Windows doesn't reliably ensure low power consumption on battery (seriously, I have to hibernate/shut down my laptop when I stop using it, otherwise it will consume its entire battery in 8hrs during sleep mode, somehow), and so on. Most problems with Windows laptops aren't Intel's fault, IMO.

I agree that Intel really should clarify, at least, the difference between their "Celeron" class (e-core only) and "Core" class processors (with P cores), since there's such a massive difference in performance capability between them.

> There is no reason for a CPU to be running higher than idle the vast majority of the time in a laptop, for tasks that you would be using a laptop for on battery.

True. I once got suspicious and opened the process list window. I had installed a server so I could stream to my Roku device, and I wasn't streaming, yet the server was sucking up quite a bit of compute time, all the time.

I uninstalled it.

>Most problems with Windows laptops aren't Intel's fault, IMO.

Intel works very thoroughly with Microsoft, and it is absolutely on Intel for bringing forth the most inexcusable failure mode: Laptops "sleeping" with the CPU still on and proceeding to cook themselves in your backpack because they thought they were still on mains power.

Why is this on Intel? Because they removed a C-state that actually slept properly in favor of a C-state that theoretically saved more power but in practice almost never works with how people actually use laptops.

AMD might also share the blame here. I don't know, because I don't care to know further with how stupid everything is.

Agree on the sleep state stuff. idk who's fault it really is, but at least on the software front I mostly blame microsoft, because it's really their duty to deliver consistent, reliable power consumption on battery power.

Everyone involved does a pretty poor job imo.

The processors/chipsets seem to do what they're they're supposed to. However, it's far too easy for other parties to create a scenario that prevents the system from reaching deeper c-states.

Motherboards manufacturers produce boards that can't go below C3, despite showing up to C10 in the bios. The actual level of support won't ever be mentioned.

PCI devices, e.g. wifi cards, can prevent the system from reaching deeper C states entirely.

Putting devices into a PCI slot connected to the CPU lanes rather than the PCH can also prevent the system reaching the desired states. The CPU slot will frequently be the only choice.

Operating system defaults often prevent the system from reaching deeper c-states. Linux has been worse for this than Microsoft in my experience.

> will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason

You might be thinking about Linux? IIRC OS X wasn't particularly impressive about that back in the x86 days and high-end Macs had horrible battery life.

No, this is Windows. It absolutely can use minimal power, but my experience closely monitoring my laptops consumption is it will regularly spike from 5-6w to 15-20w for extended periods, which obviously obliterates battery life. I've been unable to figure out why.

My particular specimen came with a 97wh battery (XPS), so it would be able to linger on for ~10+hrs if it could maintain its idle power consumption with brief spikes to do work, but in reality it's basically always less than that in my experience (and worse, its inconsistent as hell about it).

The other issue is sleep states, which as another commenter mentions leads to laptops using all of their battery in your backpack so it's dead by the time you actually try to use it :'(

It's made worse by comparison to modern phones, which deliver reliable, consistent power consumption throughout the day - so a laptop that regularly lasts a fraction of the time and doesn't know how to sleep just looks awful by comparison.

I don’t think I have ever had a Windows laptop last 10 hours without a consistent effort to keep it in low power modes, keeping screen brightness as low as I can, and actively keeping the number of running processes and background programs as low as I can.

Sure 10-15 years ago, we were lucky to get 3-4 hours of battery life so getting 8-9 is great but they advertise these things as having upwards of 20 hours.

Linux not coming close to that is “acceptable” because they aren’t advertising it constantly as the reason you need to buy the latest laptop or get onto Windows 11. Apple is more honest in this regard and it really is the vertical integration that allows them to control the entire system.

> My experience with my laptops is that windows will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason.

Preinstalled bloatware is a massive problem for the average consumer. My partner is constantly surprised how well windows runs on the computers we have in our house - she’s so used to windows computers running all sorts of crap all the time. Our media box is just bare windows, but with all the obnoxious stuff disabled. (Like start menu news items, game bar, telemetry and all that).

Most work computers running windows come with antivirus and rootkits like crowdstrike. And personal computers are usually even worse. I bought a brand new HP machine a few years ago which idled at about 15% cpu usage, even on battery. It got hot and ran itself flat in no time, just sitting there. Turns out it was running some bloatware hp audio noise cancellation plugin or something all the time, even when the microphone wasn’t in use.

Modern computers are crazy fast. But there’s not much power left over if you install clown car of crap on them.

The day I lost all faith in Windows was the day when one of their top guys said that dual-core CPUs will be great because they will be able to offload antivirus software to a core while users use the remaining core for using their computers.

No words on increasing security and reducing the attack surface of Windows. Just tuck that antivirus there, keeping the status quo while ripping users of the benefits of increased processing power.

Anecdata here but I bought a thinkpad T14 in 2022. My colleague bought the same at the same time. We both have identical machines except for me opting for an intel processor and him picking an AMD. My laptop has heating issues and terrible battery life. His lasts an entire day and no heating issues. Forums research shows others in the same timeframe are facing the same issue as me so it is entirely Intel related.

I'd still be more inclined to blame a software issue. Do you have the exact same software installed on both?

Yes. I have bare minimum s/w on the windows 11 that came with it.

> My experience with my laptops is that windows will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason

same with my experience. My computer have a hardware issue recently, so I am on steamdeck. When I am on windows, the whole system stays on 50%+ load even I only have browser and discord opened. Playing games on it is so laggy that can't even hit 50 fps stably. But the same setup somehow works completely 60fps stable on steamos even it is literally the same hardware.

Windows is really optimized so badly for low power hardwares.

And battery life with most laptops (even the Framework) is pretty horrible on Linux compared to Windows without excessive tweaking (and even then).

I've bought i7 machines whenever I bought a new machine with my own money (so have my employers) but I've had various i3 and i5 desktops come into my possession and always been disappointed by limitations baked in. For instance I was hoping to install Steam & Proton on an i3 machine for entry level gaming but found it wouldn't talk to a 1030 card I had laying around.

On paper it looks like Intel machines from 2010-2020 have sufficient I/O bandwidth but when you look at the artificial restrictions Intel puts on i3 and i5 machines (unless you get some special motherboard with PCIe switches) it's best to assume that you won't be able to "get there from here" and that many seemingly reasonable configurations of on-board peripherals and add-on peripherals "just won't work."

It reminds me of the hassle it was to get expansion cards to work in the day of the "PC compatibles" that used the ISA and other early busses: back then you had to mess with jumper cables and which card went in what slot to resolve IRQ conflicts. It was well documented, PC builders all knew it, and I was always able to get it to work.

In the PCIe age though I have often been running into undocumented or poorly documented limits, PC builders who are totally ignorant of this (they always buy i7 and/or high end motherboards I guess.), etc.

Related to that in my mind is the equally obscure situation with USB 3 which is the laptops I've had have all had undocumented limits on how many USB devices you can plug in. In the USB 1 era it was documented that you could plug in 127 devices into a USB tree, the USB 3 doc doesn't guarantee anything! You would think you could plug your laptop into one or two USB 3 hubs with a lot of ports but my experience is that I'd start having trouble when I had 4-5 devices plugged in, then I plug in a mouse and either the sound card or a mass storage device gets unmounted.

> For instance I was hoping to install Steam & Proton on an i3 machine for entry level gaming but found it wouldn't talk to a 1030 card I had laying around.

this is absolutely a skill issue, there is no limitations about plugging anything into an i3 and in fact i3s are popular industrial processors and SOHO servers since they support ecc during the skylake era.

the rest of your comment all springs from the apparent issues you had installing a pcie card and doesn’t really say anything once that point is dismissed.

Windows sleep mode is power hungry since the introduction of Modern Standby that allow for network connections even during sleep mode.

While the Intel laptop CPUs may have been not good enough, that is not where Intel has lost money.

The current financial results have shown decent profits for the consumer CPUs, which could have been greater if Intel had succeeded to produce more Meteor Lake CPUs. Intel could not produce as many Meteor Lake CPUs as the demand because their new Intel 4 manufacturing process has low production yields.

While Intel lost money in their foundry, that was unavoidable due to the high expenses needed for catching up with TSMC.

Where Intel had great losses was in server CPUs. The reason for these losses must have been that Intel had to grant very large discounts to the big buyers of server CPUs, in order to convince them to not buy superior AMD server CPUs.

These losses in server CPUs were easily predictable, because even if Intel has succeeded to reach in time all the publicly announced milestones of their roadmap, their roadmap itself does not hope to reach parity with the AMD server CPUs before H2 2025 (and that assuming that AMD will not introduce Zen 6 during 2025, which would move the target).

It looks like Intel has made a PR mistake. Even if their public roadmap has shown all the time that they will continue to have big losses for at least one more year, that was obvious only for technical people, who could compare the future Intel products with the AMD products, because Intel has not said any word in their roadmap about what the competition will have at the same time. For non-technical people, the Intel press releases sounded more optimistic than they should have been, leading to disappointment caused by financial results that should not have been surprising.

> The current financial results have shown decent profits for the consumer CPUs,

Only after serious financial alchemy. The client group has a decent op margin, but the foundry group has an absolutely terrible one, and the client group sells products that they buy (internally) from the foundry group at arbitrarily set prices. What would the client margins be if the internal price they pay for their products was set so that the foundry breaks even?

Are client margins different for Lunar Lake, where the compute/platform tiles are made by TSMC?

iirc the reason for that split in margins is precisely because Intel started pricing their foundry internally as-if they were external sales (i.e. made at competitive prices).

bad product is a symptoms of a even deeper cause... Lack of competition. The decline of intel started long ago. The financial results here are just very very lagging indicator of that. The lack of competition combined with very agressive anti competitive practice allow them to survive on pretty bad product line. In a healthy market, competition would have force intel to improve well before the point we are now

They are only moving because AMD is finally providing that competition, but it's not fair to say that "if only AMD had gotten their act together sooner, intel would be a better comapny."

Ultimately, intel chose to let intel rot while AMD was out of the picture. (ignoring that intel's backroom deals with Dell and co. are a big part of what pushed AMD out)

AMD and ARM-based solutions too. I can't picture wanting to run Windows on ARM for a few product generations but for server use I'd have no problem w/ Linux on ARM.

ultimately it was a focus on marketing that led them to kill engineering

(if itanium and the many failures and lucky breaks that led up to it hadn't already convinced you that intel might never have had good engineering)

Intel tried to get away from x86 over and over again with radically overengineered architectures that didn't work (as well as mainstream architectures) and failed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

> Ultrabooks aren't a terrible concept; they're the Wintel version of Macbook Airs.

I'd say both are a terrible concept. I mean, it sells, but it's still terrible. A laptop being thin is not really such a virtue and people's life would be better with a decent-travel keyboard, better heat dissipation and more ports than with 5-10mm less laptop height.

I don't really care that much about brands nor laptops for that matter, but my M1 Air is really, really nice given the money I've paid for it. Why should I burden myself with carrying a big laptop thing when I can instead carry a Macbook Air that is much lighter and which does very good job?

Who are you to say what would make people's lives better?

An actual computer user who's probably at least as qualified as whoever made these decisions at Intel.

I'm an actual computer user and I disagree. Now what?

Now, hopefully, we all come to a simple realization: opinions vary.

Heat dissipation and lots of ports are why I have a desktop. I don't want that from my MacBook Air. A fan isn't necessary or desirable for a machine that is primarily used for web browsing, watching movies, and light gaming.

You know what I want for my desktop, is a battery, so my computer doesn't reboot when I lose power for 5 seconds. Yes I know about UPSes, but they're $100+ and unwieldy. I just need 30 seconds grace period to save my work!

This is the main reason why I probably won't get a desktop again.

Amortized cost of a desktop is like 1/3rd that of a laptop of comparable performance. You're willing to pay thousands more because you don't want to pay for an UPS? This doesn't check out.

The space argument makes more sense and from that I assume you're in a space constrained apartment.

At the end of day I'm more curious what causes those intermittent power outages. Are you regularly tripping breakers?

It happens twice a year, it goes out neighborhood-wide during a storm or an animal chewed through something.

Anyway I don't know where you get that "amortized cost" number. They seem a lot closer in price than that to me.

Depends on the class of performance you want. I think at the low end laptops are surprisingly cost-competitive with desktops, but if you want high-end laptops either don't exist or are hilariously expensive.

Also depends on the type of laptop. A desktop-replacement laptop with extremely basic frame and screen (ie. cheap and shit) can have excellent specs at a competitive price, whereas an XPS or mac with a great screen, aluminium frame etc will be very expensive relative to the specification.

This. Additionally desktop parts last longer and can be upgraded individually. They also have good resale value, offsetting the cost of upgrades (especially true for GPUs).

True even for the mini form factor (the 1L desktop that uses laptop component). As you do not have to stay close to it, you have a great experience out of the box. I could use a chromebook for what I still use the laptop for (browsing and ssh from the sofa)

Silly and dangerous idea: open up a power supply, study it thoroughly, then connect a 300 volt battery bank in parallel with the DC link capacitors.

The UPS is a battery...

For some of us, a laptop is essentially an easily movable desktop. It's not portable as in "I want to travel with it", it's portable as in "I can easily take it anywhere within my house/office".

Those kind of "movable desktops" benefit from performance, additional ports, etc, and instead have little use for thinness or less weight.

I simply cannot see myself ever owning a bulky, noisy desktop ever again.

The desktop replacement segment of the laptop market exists, but does not undermine the validity of more portable machines or make a fanless laptop a terrible idea. The viability of desktop replacement notebooks as desktop replacements is in large part due to the efficiency gains driven by the demand for the other kind of laptop—the ones that are thin and light. A 5lb+ slab of a notebook is still a pretty constrained form factor compared to the thermals and acoustics of a mini tower desktop.

I can understand you characterizing desktops as bulky, but calling them noisy in comparison to desktop replacement laptops is ridiculously wrong. Small fans with restricted airflow are what makes computers noisy, and they're much easier to avoid with a desktop form factor. Your laptop cannot sustain desktop performance without getting loud, and if it doesn't get loud under sustained load it's because your laptop is choosing to instead get slow.

> it's portable as in "I can easily take it anywhere within my house/office"

As I grow older, that is becoming less and less true. Unless it’s for quick tasks, I prefer my office chair, my big monitor and my comfortable keyboard. Laptop are still great, for ad-hoc computing and traveling, and I’d prefer a less power-hungry device for these.

My argument was actually focused on "I want to travel with it". But - I travel with it to places where I need to connect to to things: A monitor in a hotel room; a USB device of a friend or host; a physical network in an institution or company or a home I'm visiting. That's what the ports are for.

As for the keyboard - I absolutely need a decent keyboard to type, traveling or no.

I've recently started using a fanless laptop as my primary day to day device, and 100% agreed I'm never going back.

I'll give up a LOT of performance for silent and long battery life, because I find waiting a second occasionally much less annoying than a fan blasting randomly, or my legs baking. SSDs have largely resolved the perceived UX latency issues that used to occur, CPUs and GPUs now are far more powerful than needed for everything but specialized stuff (compiling, encoding, stuff that intentionally maxes out the machine. Regular applications do not do this, on purpose, but they do regularly bog down on I/O).

Though the screen on this thing is awful.

That's wrong and the market has proven it. The M3 MacBook Air is the best computer for most people - period, not just best ultrabook or best laptop. There are almost no compromises for 99% of people's usage.

> The M3 MacBook Air is the best computer for most people.

Maybe, that it doesnt imply that it's the best because it's an ultrabook, or that a non-ultrabook version of the macbook air (not the macbook pro...) wouldn't have been better.

To be fair from the perspective of most consumers what downsides does the Air have that are only there because it's an "ultrabook"?

Well, I mean, if you ignore the 8GB RAM base model.. and the pricetag at 2-3x a similarly-performing windows equivalent, and probably +50% on similar screen windows equivalent.

I can make a great computer that meets everyone's use cases for 2x the going price too :).

Unfortunately it is far too easy for a non-savvy person to walk into a store and buy a piece of shit windows laptop for the same price as a macbook, because they don't know what they want or need and the salesmen aren't that interested in making sure you get good value :'(

> and the pricetag at 2-3x a similarly-performing windows equivalent, and probably +50% on similar screen windows equivalent.

Can you actually list any of these "equivalents"? I'm actually genuinely curious

Just to get this straight you're saying that you can get a Windows laptop that's just as fast, has comparable battery life and build quality as an M3 Air for $400-650 (i.e. 1/3 - 1/2 of the cheapest 16 GB Air)? Really?

> Unfortunately it is far too easy for a non-savvy person

So could you help those of use who are not that savvy by being more specific?

I don't think you could find a windows laptop with comparable build quality (or display quality, which I consider important if you intend to use a laptop for its intended purpose) for 1/2 the price of the air. I do think you could find a laptop in the same performance ballpark (ie. 75%+ of the single core speed, which seems to be where the newest gen Intel mobile chips sit in comparison). This is a bigger difference than I expected, admittedly, though the gap closes if you care about multicore performance numbers.

Here in AU, a 16GB air with 512GB SSD = 2400AUD. The base model (8/256)) = 1800 AUD.

I would consider an appropriate comparison model to the air to be something like this: https://www.harveynorman.com.au/acer-swift-go-evo-14-inch-co...

For 1/2 the price, you get a laptop with an OLED screen and one of the newest/fastest non-M3 processors you can buy. It also happened to be the cheapest laptop with a new Meteor lake processor I could find, though I'd have to imagine there are laptops with worse specifications in other areas for the cheaper.

You can obviously spend up from there to improve build quality, get more SSD space (probably by swapping out the stock NVMe drive), more RAM (if you're lucky maybe they have SODIMMs, though I'd guess most laptops, especially non-16", might have soldered memory).

In terms of non-savvy vs savvy, mostly it's that a non-savvy laptop buyer, generally speaking, doesn't understand:

- Screen quality/tech. Resolution, TN vs IPS vs OLED, matte vs gloss, maximum brightness

- How different processor generations compare. Especially walking into a store, it's common in my experience for laptops with 5500u (Zen 2 6 core) to be sitting next to a laptop with a new eg. 125H, both at similar prices. The newer processor is the pick (performance wise), but this is completely nonobvious. It's particularly bad at lower specs, where you can have an i3 N300 (8 e cores) next to perhaps a Ryzen 5700u or Intel 13600h...

In theory salespeople should lead them in the right direction, but likely as not they can spend twice as much on a fancy laptop that looks schmick (and probably is) when they could get 90% of the same experience with something like the Acer above. eg: https://www.harveynorman.com.au/hp-envy-x360-14-inch-ultra-7...

This is admittedly a 2in1, and it has a better processor, but it could well be worse in every other way.

>Can you actually list any of these "equivalents"? I'm actually genuinely curious

I paid ~780 Euros a year ago for a 14" Lenovo with an 8 core AMD Ryzen 7840HS, 32GB LPDDR5X and 1TB NVME, and 2560x1600 IPS display. I can't justify spending double the Euros for a Mac with less RAM and storage. I just can't. Now you can even get laptops with OLED screens for that price.

Oh and best of all, the screen can open almost 180 degrees meaning I can prop it up higher on a portable flip stand for better neck ergonomics and still view the screen at a 90 degree angle VS MacBooks which can only open ~135 degrees reducing the positions at which you can use the machine as the moment I prop it up, the screen faces my chest instead of my face while opened all the way.

Macs may be technically superior on paper but they have all these design quirks and limitations because they only want you to use the products in this very specific way that one design guru in Cupertino though of is the right way to use a laptop while looking cool, and I say screw that, I'm the customer, I should be able to use it however I think is best for me.

If I were doing stuff like photo/video editing for a living or developing iOS or MacOS apps, a MacBook would totally be worth it due to it being better for those tasks (or the only option), but for my own use cases of web + Windows + Linux + light PC gaming, Apple's products make no sense to me especially given their prices in Europe compared to Col and wages.

From my recent purchase decision:

14 macbook pro, 32gb of ram, 1tb of storage, 120Hz high res sceen: 2900€

HP Elitebook, same specs, same weight, etc.: 1200€

https://www.campuspoint.de/hp-elitebook-845-g11-sondermodell...

Surely, the macbook pro will be better in some ways but at that price difference "better" is just not good enough.

A Macbook Air M3 is significantly faster than this HP Elitebook in for example compilation tasks.

I don’t know about all of you but in my day to day work I compile code very often, and I used personally a work issued M2 Air and a work issued HP Elitebook Raptor Lake. The M2 Air was leaps faster, leaps.

Some older and more traditional colleague who had a Alder Lake workstation laptop was surprised how much faster the M2 was to his machine.

The M3? No, the opposite. It is pretty much a wash with the M3 Pro and for 3x the price this is not at all "significant".

The market? I don't know a single person personally or professionally with a MacBook Air. I haven't seen one in person in like 7 years.

Anecdotes don't really cut it though. I see MacBook Airs all the time, even had a MBA M1 that I handed down to my partner when I got a MBP M3, she uses it both personally and professionally. Two other friends have MBAs, a third just bought one yesterday.

At cafés in Stockholm I'd say 50% of the laptops I see people working with are a version of the MBA. At local universities it's an even higher percentage.

There is nothing wrong about the concept of ultrabook. Just terrible implementation.

The implementation is left up to the OEMs but they seem to have done pretty well. Thin and lights are in a pretty good spot overall.

Have people forgotten how bad laptops were in like 2010? Great big chunks of plastic that somehow still feel cheap and weightless, keyboard flex, mushy keys. They were really quite bad.

I would have agreed with you a couple months ago, but picked up an air for travel so I could leave the 15” MBP at home and I’m really enjoying it and appreciating how thin and light it is. Wouldn’t want it for home or office use but for occasional on the go use? Perfect. And I imagine for many it would suite their needs pretty well

Thin and Light are two independent variables, you can make a lightweight PC which still has good keyboard, thermals, repairable and ports by making it few mm thick. Its utility on the go comes primarily from weight and not thinness.

I travel frequently. Thinness is absolutely a significant mobility factor.

I actually hate thinness for the sake of being thin, I want practical amounts of USB-A ports and a god damn headphone jack. But a thinner laptop is easier to stow in my luggage and handle in space-limited environments like a hotel room desk or a seat table in an airliner or lounge.

Likewise, I don't want a chungus portable phone from 1993, but I also want my smartphone to be thick enough to reasonably grasp and have a headphone jack.

This is also putting aside the fact that most people in general clearly prefer thinner and lighter computing over thicker and/or heavier.

There are times and places for a bigly desktop replacement tabletop heavy enough to crush your kneecaps and hot enough to burn your skin, but most people don't need that.

Sure but thin and compact are also good for travel as it can slide into bag pocket easy or even a large purse and not take up much room.

The new MacBook Air design is really fantastic.

Sorry, but both of these are, IMHO, irrelevant. You can't connect them to (almost) anything, and they don't have a decent keyboard to type on. I might as well use an etch-a-sketch or something.

Speaking of being light, though - a Lenovo X220 is pretty light. With today's tech and the amount of money an AirBook goes for you could reduce the weight much further.

> people's life would be better with a decent-travel keyboard

Most people don't generally seem to agree with that, though (not explicitly, they just generally don't prioritize things like that)

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