The only time I worry about heat is if I have to have the laptop in my lap.
On top of all this, AMD's 6nm Rembrandt coming out next year is likely to have a model in the 20W range, which is on par with the M1's "performance" mode, but with much greater GPU performance.
I think the epitaph being written for x86 is a little premature, maybe for Intel, but AMD just delivered 20% IPC improvement, and a huge gfx architecture improvement, with a scalable chiplet architecture going forward.
It would be unwise to count them out.
Apple are clearly making trade offs and I suspect that gamers aren't a priority - for lots and lots of people having a laptop with this performance and power efficiency is going to be a compelling proposition.
No, but for that, I don't need much more than a Chromebook either. Are we really saying an Surface/Surface Pro can't run office for 99% of the use cases and workloads people use it for?
> if you're using a laptop is for work is run out of battery
Majority of people I know how have Macbooks have them plugged in when at the office or at home. And many offices have power-bricks in conference rooms pre-installed, especially with USB-C charging, your laptop can charge just by plugging it into your monitor, or in any standard USB-C port in a conference room.
Unless your office is Starbucks, let's face it, for most of corporate America, and home work during COVID, people are plugged in a majority of the time.
Saying that you'll probably have a power supply nearby is fine - except for the cases when you don't - I can't count the cases when I've seen people scrambling to find power in a meeting and it's a pain and embarassing. People will take avoiding that over cores they don't need.
Baldur's Gate 3 demos notwithstanding, Apple seems to have little interest in PC gaming, which is usually Windows/DirectX first with macOS being a distant afterthought or delayed, overpriced port. They also killed off 32-bit games, which further reduced the PC game landscape on macOS.
However, Apple has its own massive ecosystem of game devs on iOS, and it also has Apple Arcade.
If a PC game isn't on iOS, you may have to rely on cloud gaming if you want to play it on macOS in the future - which may not be much worse than the current situation of mediocre ports.
A14 isn't competing with Intel/AMD at 5W.
It's one thing to run a benchmark when your device is cold, it's another to ask what the performance w/ passive cooling will be life after an hour of strenuous work.
But almost everyone I know with a laptop spends the majority of the time working with it docked to power, and often a monitor. If you're using a laptop for work, and you're not running out of a coffee shop, do you want a Zen3 with 32-64Gb RAM, 8-16 cores and an RDNA2 graphics APU at 50W (Rembrandt), or do you want a a device that will play video for 18 hours?
Especially for gaming, Apple's GPU is still years behind AMD and NVidia. They're bragging about 22Gp/s fillrate when latest mobile discrete GPUs do 5-10x that.
Certainly, they have achieved a lot and are crushing Intel integrated chips at the low end, but there's a ton of marketing fluff and special case comparisons going on, and I look forward to seeing a real head-to-head matchup, of say a Zen3 based system against a MacBook on a heavy CPU and GPU bound benchmark like a triple-AAA title.
Years of synthetic benchmarks that exercise giant CPU caches leaves much to be desired.