The main thing driving this is that people are comparing a new M1 to their Intel Mac laptops with processors from ~2016 and then naturally it's a marked improvement because it's being compared to a five year old machine.

You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system and they're competitive. They win some and lose others. Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month. Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. It's plausible that it will be AMD's again in a couple months when we get Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache.

They're all within single digit percentages of each other and the winner is whoever released their top end processor most recently.

This is quite misleading in multiple ways.

The M1 Max has the same single thread performance as the M1, which has been out for around a year.

You're also comparing Intel's latest desktop CPU to a laptop CPU. Before the M1, a laptop CPU competing with the highest-end consumer desktop CPU in multi-core OR single-core was unthinkable and had never happened. Yes, there have been leaks in which Alder Lake's mobile CPU beats the M1, but we don't know whether these benchmarks are representing the numbers we'll be seeing in consumer laptops with laptop cooling.

That being said, I hope there will be competition!

[0] almost literally by the thermal numbers

I compared my 2014 MBP to 2019 MBP and there was no marked difference. It was running hot and eating battery very fast. 2019 Intel Mac and 2020 M1 Mac are two completely different animals. Also, the price drop for a better-performing machine was jaw-dropping.

The i9-9980HK (released April 2019) in the 16" 2019 Macbook Pro looks like the highest-end mobile i9 Intel had released as of November 2019 when the laptop launched.

And the i7-9750H in the base model was also launched in April of that year, and looks like it was their 2nd-fastest mobile hexacore i7 at the time?

I don't think the GPU is much of an upgrade, but it does have tensor cores, the better video encoder (could be an OBS monster) and I believe better thermals. I am sure putting Pop!_OS or Manjaro on it would make this a great *nix platform for developers, content creators or streamers.

Trying to find a cheaper apple quality device that is as good... you'll really be limited to the cheaper Yoga 4k screen models and their ilk. But I have no experience with those devices.

This is the inconvenient truth of these discussions. If anything, Apple is under playing the bang for the buck and performance per watt of these machines.

All the Intel machines I've looked into have fans and still manage to be 30-50% slower.

I’m fact I use an M1 iPad right now. It’s great. For browsing Facebook and video calls and doing remote work, it’s perfect. And for serious workloads, those go straight to my desktop workstation (AMD). Best of both worlds.

I mean, yes, somewhat, in (almost comically) high power desktop configurations, depending on which benchmark you believe. This is of cold comfort to anyone who wants a fast laptop, though.

To get the most energy efficiency out of the M1s is to use binaries/programs that have been specifically compiled for the M1.

M1 macs are just really damn fast for daily usage.

My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" out of the water in every conceivable way. I'd elaborate but there seriously isn't any dimension of it that isn't an improvement. Maybe the smaller display?

That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed.

Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling.

One visit to XPS owner’s subreddit was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying it.

if i run same vscode dotnetcore workload on m1 air, that thing lasts atleast 10hours on battery and no heat whatsover. better, the compile time is usually faster than 3800 bucks worth dell precision (on a 1200 bucks laptop)

First off the M1 Air has no fans.

Second the MBP 16" was the one with the improved cooling, so it wasn't throttled randomly by using the wrong charging port.

And finally the whole reason the M1s are so well cooled is there's no 100W SoC, or 200W probably when you consider the additional dedicated GPU in my 16".

My M1 has a 10W TDP!

10!

I don't think the GPU alone in my 16" could have been cooled by a solution handling 10W.

-

Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw, my 16" would have had higher wall power than my M1 Air by far.

Even the M1 Mac Mini maxed out at like 30W from the wall: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119344.png

And my M1 has a lower rated version of that (10W vs 24W)

For desktops I don't care about TDP but a laptop is the exact opposite.

Your M1 Air doesn't have an M1 Pro or Max, either, which I clearly specified. Why are you talking about M1 power draw in your response when that's not the SoC in question?

> Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw,

Power in == heat out. CPUs don't do mechanical work, all power is converted to heat.

If the 'TDP' is less than peak power draw (and is actually respected in some form), it simply means the SoC is intended to power throttle after a duration. But that's so far not the case for any of the M1's, so claimed TDP is fully irrelevant as it's seemingly not enforced in any way. Which isn't unique to Apple fwiw, AMD's claimed TDPs are equally irrelevant.

You're free to bring in your third option which clobbers it even further, but an $800 fanless machine also clobbers it so it's a perfectly valid comparison when trying to counter weird claims that Apple only just now started working on proper cooling...

tl;dr: How can you claim the old 16" is only being beat because Apple just now started to care about cooling when a fanless machine also beats it? -

Also TDP is an advertising figure but when you're talking about orders of magnitude it's a perfectly fine way to talk about parts as long as you stay consistent in TDP vs wall draw

Wall draw to wall draw, my M1 Air draws under 30W and beats a 16" drawing over 100W

TDP to TDP my M1 is 10W to a 16" closer to 100W.

In both cases it should be obvious why cooling is less of an issue...

This is completely incorrect. You cannot compare TDPs in any meaningful way except kinda within a single vendor's single generation. There's no standard definition for TDP, so it cannot be generally compared across brands.

And for most brands TDP doesn't have any useful meaning, further eliminating any value to be had from it.

> Wall draw to wall draw, my M1 Air draws under 30W and beats a 16" drawing over 100W

Are you sure? What workload(s)? How did you measure power draw? And 16" isn't a CPU/SoC, so what are you even comparing against? Your M1 Air sure as shit isn't beating the current 100w 16" after all. So I'm guessing you're comparing against a previous MBP 16" of some unknown variety, which one specifically in which configuration?

> TDP to TDP my M1 is 10W to a 16" closer to 100W.

Apple never shipped an Intel CPU with a 100w TDP in any MBP of any size. So not only is this comparison meaningless, you're not even using the right numbers. The i9-9980HK that I'm guessing you're referring to is a 45w TDP. But see above about you can't compare TDPs, they have no meaning.

The older ones got really toasty, but it's not like the XPS faired better in the thermal design department.

Both these had their own quirks, (I returned the XPS I got from my place of work twice because I couldn't stand the insane amount of coil whine)

Been running the 2019 MBP since it was released and it's been a pretty pleasant experience overal. Only issue I've had was with external displays drawing too much power, which was fixed by forcing the refresh rate to 59.98Hz.

The previous setup was closer to 200W SoC (100W each for CPU and GPU) than 100W total.

From Anandtech[0]:

> Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power.

2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work.

3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.

In a 16” at least, the Max can go up to 92W per anandtech’s initial test, and display + ram + rest brings the wallplug draw to 120.

I have a hard time believing that one company is doing miracle work in a small and light laptop. That's also true in the other direction - I don't really believe that Apple's machines deliver desktop performance on battery remaining cool and quiet over longer times...

I hope they improved in 2019, mine was only from a year before that.

I wonder how much of that is due to a "finally, a good laptop" sentiment. I have used a lot of laptops over the years, and each and every one of them have been terrible in lots of ways, especially recently. If M1s "solve" the laptop problem, that would be great.

It's less powerful than a modern desktop, but not by much. More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail.

UI scaling is also a big one. I have a Dell XPS 15 in 2014/2015 with Windows 8.1 and the UI scaling wasn't great.

other tools like the Dash app are also amazing tools to speed up the development process. It will take some getting used to moving from Windows and to a far lesser extent linux, however with the right tools for the job you will end up being more productive and less frustrated. Especially compared to Windows.

Unless I need something that specifically only runs on Windows, I would use Mac/Linux over it any day of the week. For productivity it's Mac > Linux >>> Windows for me.

and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948