fastasleep

ITGUYINSD said:

The article incorrectly infers Outlook for Mac only works with IMAP accounts, which isn't true since it works with Exchange/365 accounts.

Oh, like macOS?  Remember back in good ol' days when macOS was lean and stable, but at the same time, feature-poor and not supporting the newest hardware compared to Windows?  Then, Apple starts adding features and brining macOS into the current century and it's bloated and buggy.  Each new version is worse than the last.

thadec said:

dewme said:

fastasleep said:

dewme said:

fastasleep said:

dewme said:

The operating systems and the applications that are optimized for those operating systems have a hell of a lot more sway over buying behaviors than do benchmarks or narrow slices of very domain specific applications. No matter what platform I’ve ever used, the computer always spends a heck of a lot more time waiting on me than I spend waiting on the computer. But if you get paid to run benchmarks the situation may be reversed. 

Or, maybe if you actually work in the applications they used for these benchmarks? What a weird dismissal of the target audience for this comparison, because you're not one of those people.

I have to agree with you. If your productivity and/or your happiness is directly tied to running the exact applications with the same or similar datasets to those used in a benchmark comparison then you should be seeking out the best computer that delivers those things for you. If you’re faced with a choice between computer A and computer B a particular benchmark that you care about may sway you one way or the other, everything else being equal. 

The problem I have with Mac vs PC comparisons is that it is fairly rare for “everything else being equal.” This leads me to be dismissive of most benchmarks in such scenarios like the one in this article, mostly because they tend to be too narrowly focused rather than geared towards the more typical way most people use computers for a variety of tasks. They also tend to overlook the entrenchment effect that exists in both camps. 

A lot of the reasons and rationale being used on both sides of the debate are mostly being used to justify the individual choices and preferences that have already been established and ingrained into one’s existing belief system, like the necessity of plugging the PC into an existing power source to attain full performance. If the tables were turned, say by Apple offering up a big performance boost when plugged in, there would be plenty of defenders of that option. 

A lot of what we’re seeing is similar to car comparisons and benchmarks like 0-60 times. The 0-60 benchmarks may be completely legitimate, but they are rarely the deciding factor in choosing one vehicle type or vehicle brand over another. The entire vehicle taken in aggregate plus the needs of the buyer and their budget have greater sway than 0-60 times. But sure, to your point, if you are a professional drag racer of showroom stock cars and want to win races, you’re going to pick the car with the fastest 0-60 time and probably don’t care as much about the leather seats, cargo space, and seating capacity for 8 people. 

This isn't a Mac vs PC comparison inasmuch as it's a comparison of raw power doing tasks that can measure just that using these chips. It's very plainly stated in the article what they're measuring. Not "the more typical way most people use computers for a variety of tasks". Not "leather seats" etc. And, once again, there are plenty of people who work in software like Premiere, Cinema 4D, Blender, etc all day long to whom this information is useful, myself included. 

Would you personally switch platforms based on one particular product’s measurable performance advantage on a set of benchmarks that matter to you? If a year later the tables are turned, would you then go back the other way? If my income was tightly bound to the performance deltas and the apps in question were a revenue affecting constraint/bottleneck in my overall business process then I would have to answer “yes.” Most business people don’t want to leave money on the table, regardless of their personal preferences.

On the other hand, I do understand what you and others are saying with respect to a particular processor+GPU combination from the overwhelmingly dominant personal computing platform clearly demonstrating that for certain applications, like GPU intensive creativity apps and games, the current “best benchmark leader” that Apple has available is clearly not the fastest option in the overall market, a market that Apple owns about 10% of. But this has generally been the case for a very long time, especially when it comes to gaming.

The real question is whether these obvious disparities at the processing level will inspire Apple to up their game. I think that for as long as Apple enjoys its advantage across the “variety of tasks” spectrum with its intensely loyal 10% market share customer base the answer is “eventually.” Apple set out on a path with Apple Silicon knowing where their pros/cons were and with some stark advantages in some areas like performance per watt, single threaded performance, and graphics performance for an integrated CPU based system. They are now iterating on their initial design to improve on the pros and lessen the cons.

Apple’s competition is absolutely doing the same thing in terms of their own set of pros/cons. I’m sure that the competition’s answer to the same question, whether their obvious disparities in areas where Apple dominates their current offerings will inspire them to up their game is also “eventually.” The relative market share disparity hasn’t changed a whole lot either way in a very long time and Apple is doing extremely well on the revenue front with their small slice. They are sticking to a roadmap that is serving them very well. In the meantime don’t venture too far from a wall plug if you have a discrete GPU based PC and try to force yourself to get excited about Apple Arcade if you’re a Mac user.

Apple's "stark advantages" in single threaded performance was never as big as the Apple fandom claimed, as benchmarks done not long after the M1 became available showed, and became even less so after 12th gen, 13th gen Intel and AMD Ryzen 4 was released. Releasing the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra and the M2 line widened the gap back again, but it was obvious that this was temporary. The main thing is that no one in the x86 world cares about single thread performance anyway because Intel and AMD cores have had 2 threads for decades and most applications have been written in that time to take advantage of them. So the gloating over single threaded performance was funny because it is a useless metric: single core performance (which measures ALL the threads available on the core) is far more useful. Ironically, if there is an application where single threaded performance matters it is gaming! Where the situation for Apple is hopeless because AAA games - whether console or "PC" - are nearly all 32 bit and use DirectX or Vulkan drivers. 

Apple's "stark advantage" in power per watt is mostly due to being on TSMC 5 where AMD until recently was on TSMC 6 or TSMC 7 and Intel was on 14nm and is now on 10nm. You have already seen where AMD's 7040 4nm laptop chips outperform certain Apple Silicon chips on power per watt. But the big issue is going to be Intel because - unlike AMD - they have adopted big.LITTLE. When their laptop chips reach 5nm (Intel calls it 20A) they are going to rival Apple Silicon in power per watt also.

Apple's market share was only 10% in the past year. Normally it is 5% to 7%. Also "In the meantime don’t venture too far from a wall plug if you have a discrete GPU based PC" simply isn't true. It wasn't true of the Intel MacBook Pros that you guys happily used right up until 4Q 2020 so don't pretend that it is the case now. Even Intel Core i9 laptops with the most power-hungry Nvidia graphics cards get over 3 hours battery life. CPUs and discrete GPUs that are actually designed for mobile laptops - as opposed to "laptops as workstations" - get 7 to 8 hours. Also, I would like to know the people that are spending 11 hours editing 4K videos with their MacBook Pros on their laps. They aren't. Their MacBooks are plugged into the wall just as their Wintel brethren are, because pretty much any actual work on a laptop requires a monitor. The only performance-intensive application where using the 14" laptop screen and keyboard/trackpad for hours instead of a monitor (when a "laptop" actually sits in your lap) is - again - gaming where Apple will need to address the 32 bit and driver situation. 

avon b7 said:

fastasleep said:

avon b7 said:

A MBP will give you more battery time but an Intel laptop of this kind will do the job well enough if you aren't pushing it to the limit (which you would only do with it plugged in anyway). 

As someone who works in animation and video, I can tell you firsthand that the difference between battery life on my 16" M1 Max and my previous 2018 i9 MBP is *HUGE*, and I work away from my desks all the time. Being able to work for hours in After Effects/FCP without having to look for an outlet is a game changer for me, and for a lot of people (see the M2 Pro/Max unplugged challenge video Apple showed at that event). My 140W charger rarely comes out of my bag.

You're completely missing the point when you say "which you would only do with it plugged in anyway" — the point is, you no longer have to do that with Apple Silicon. That's game changing.

I am not missing the point. 

The point isn't battery life. The point is performance. Reduced battery life is simply a byproduct of the performance and is rendered (pun?) worthless when evaluating exactly and only that.

As I said, anyone considering this kind of machine is fully aware of the battery powered tradeoffs. 

You may work away from your desk most of the time but are you claiming there are no sockets on hand almost everywhere you work? 

dewme said:

fastasleep said:

dewme said:

fastasleep said:

dewme said:

The operating systems and the applications that are optimized for those operating systems have a hell of a lot more sway over buying behaviors than do benchmarks or narrow slices of very domain specific applications. No matter what platform I’ve ever used, the computer always spends a heck of a lot more time waiting on me than I spend waiting on the computer. But if you get paid to run benchmarks the situation may be reversed. 

Or, maybe if you actually work in the applications they used for these benchmarks? What a weird dismissal of the target audience for this comparison, because you're not one of those people.

I have to agree with you. If your productivity and/or your happiness is directly tied to running the exact applications with the same or similar datasets to those used in a benchmark comparison then you should be seeking out the best computer that delivers those things for you. If you’re faced with a choice between computer A and computer B a particular benchmark that you care about may sway you one way or the other, everything else being equal. 

The problem I have with Mac vs PC comparisons is that it is fairly rare for “everything else being equal.” This leads me to be dismissive of most benchmarks in such scenarios like the one in this article, mostly because they tend to be too narrowly focused rather than geared towards the more typical way most people use computers for a variety of tasks. They also tend to overlook the entrenchment effect that exists in both camps. 

A lot of the reasons and rationale being used on both sides of the debate are mostly being used to justify the individual choices and preferences that have already been established and ingrained into one’s existing belief system, like the necessity of plugging the PC into an existing power source to attain full performance. If the tables were turned, say by Apple offering up a big performance boost when plugged in, there would be plenty of defenders of that option. 

A lot of what we’re seeing is similar to car comparisons and benchmarks like 0-60 times. The 0-60 benchmarks may be completely legitimate, but they are rarely the deciding factor in choosing one vehicle type or vehicle brand over another. The entire vehicle taken in aggregate plus the needs of the buyer and their budget have greater sway than 0-60 times. But sure, to your point, if you are a professional drag racer of showroom stock cars and want to win races, you’re going to pick the car with the fastest 0-60 time and probably don’t care as much about the leather seats, cargo space, and seating capacity for 8 people. 

This isn't a Mac vs PC comparison inasmuch as it's a comparison of raw power doing tasks that can measure just that using these chips. It's very plainly stated in the article what they're measuring. Not "the more typical way most people use computers for a variety of tasks". Not "leather seats" etc. And, once again, there are plenty of people who work in software like Premiere, Cinema 4D, Blender, etc all day long to whom this information is useful, myself included. 

Would you personally switch platforms based on one particular product’s measurable performance advantage on a set of benchmarks that matter to you? If a year later the tables are turned, would you then go back the other way? If my income was tightly bound to the performance deltas and the apps in question were a revenue affecting constraint/bottleneck in my overall business process then I would have to answer “yes.” Most business people don’t want to leave money on the table, regardless of their personal preferences.

On the other hand, I do understand what you and others are saying with respect to a particular processor+GPU combination from the overwhelmingly dominant personal computing platform clearly demonstrating that for certain applications, like GPU intensive creativity apps and games, the current “best benchmark leader” that Apple has available is clearly not the fastest option in the overall market, a market that Apple owns about 10% of. But this has generally been the case for a very long time, especially when it comes to gaming.

The real question is whether these obvious disparities at the processing level will inspire Apple to up their game. I think that for as long as Apple enjoys its advantage across the “variety of tasks” spectrum with its intensely loyal 10% market share customer base the answer is “eventually.” Apple set out on a path with Apple Silicon knowing where their pros/cons were and with some stark advantages in some areas like performance per watt, single threaded performance, and graphics performance for an integrated CPU based system. They are now iterating on their initial design to improve on the pros and lessen the cons.

Apple’s competition is absolutely doing the same thing in terms of their own set of pros/cons. I’m sure that the competition’s answer to the same question, whether their obvious disparities in areas where Apple dominates their current offerings will inspire them to up their game is also “eventually.” The relative market share disparity hasn’t changed a whole lot either way in a very long time and Apple is doing extremely well on the revenue front with their small slice. They are sticking to a roadmap that is serving them very well. In the meantime don’t venture too far from a wall plug if you have a discrete GPU based PC and try to force yourself to get excited about Apple Arcade if you’re a Mac user.