Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

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> the heatless apple silicon

To this day I still dont know why people worship Apple Silicon. Before it was even named and was mostly used by iPhone as A10, A11 and A12, when I stated these CPU are Desktop grade all I got was being laughed at. But then when it was put into usage by Mac using the same chip now known as M1, M2 etc. All of a sudden they are gold.

Apple did at one point has the leadership of PPW ( Performance per Watt ), but since then competitors have catch up. Qualcomm Oryon and ARM Cortex A930, even exceeding Apple if you look at other metrics. ( We will see what A18 has to bring us ).

-> the smoothness of the Apple trackpad

Because no other PC manufacturer is willing in invest into it and pay for it. For example speakers, it wasn't until Laptop reviewers paying attention and start saying how awful all the PC Laptop speakers were when compared to a MacBook before they started to improve. While Speakers were easier as it is low cost item. Trackpad isn't. But it got much better when Microsoft decided to invest into the PC ecosystem and Surface Laptop, so other PC manufacturers can take advantage of it. It still isn't quite as good as the one on MacBook. But Surface Laptop is pretty close, or may be just different as some would argue. Similar to Keyboard where Surface has the old MacBook 2015 scissors keyboard with better Key Stability, I value that as better than every keyboard that is currently with Apple.

What the fuck are you talking about. A current high end laptop CPU is the AMD 9955HX3D, with Geekbench 6 of 3161/19080 geekbench. M4 Pro is 3812/20076.

Why do I worship apple silicon? Because it’s literally the best performing processor for a laptop on the planet. I can use it for a full day of work from the couch on battery, no performance hit, RAM maxed out, containers running, the fans never turn on, and it barely even gets warm. Or yeah, I can plug it in like a desktop and run multiple 4k high refresh rate monitors. And it’s not even that heavy or bulky.

all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.

If you’re saying that desktop processors are still better, ok, but that’s a different story with different requirements. My MacBook is smaller than just the PSU and cooler I need for my nice desktop CPU.

+1, shame people are downvoting this.

>all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.

My point is, it was available on iPhone. And has always been the case but people brush it off because it was an Smartphone SoC.

And I literally just stated there are ARM CPU Core offering available. You either compare the whole MacBook / Laptop, or you compare the CPU / SoC. The first being there aren't many choice compared to. The latter are there but not being used by laptop manufacturers.

And this is not the first time HN has mixed the two up. And god I missed the old Anandtech where this distinction was clear.

So we shouldn’t be impressed by Apple silicon because it also runs in phones?

And yes, there are ARM laptops ASUs just brought out a laptop running on the Snapdragon X Plus. Geekbench Single Core 2231 versus the M4 at 3678.

I mean, I’m sure it’s fine for a lot of people, but fine for a lot of people isn’t all that impressive in 2025. The other ARM chips are still a long, long way off from getting close to base M series performance and features. When you start looking at the pro, ultra, etc M chips it’s another level again.

>So we shouldn’t be impressed by Apple silicon because it also runs in phones?

My point is HN was not impressed in any shape or form, even when presented with figures, when Apple silicon was used in iPhone, but is impressed with it when it was running inside a MacBook.

And you just basically reiterated my point. People are comparing devices, not CPU. ARM has Core design IP that could rival Apple's M3 design today. i.e from CPU IP Core perspective it isn't five years ahead. It just isn't being used in the current laptop range for different kind of reasons.

So you don't understand how individual people can have an opinion contrary to what 'Hacker News' thought in the past?

I participated in those conversations back then, it was a hotly contested issue, even aside from the weird criticism of individual opinions for not conforming to some imagined collective you don't seem to agree with anyway.

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