Any modern CPU, made within the past 5 years or so (perhaps longer), is plenty fast, but the software either doesn't take advantage of that speed, or is does so in a very wrong way.

There is no reason for Windows to be sluggish on any mid-range CPU or up, yet here we are. I should not, I haven't used Windows for a good while, but I see demos and people are amazed by the speed of which windows open and coming from the Mac or a light weight Linux desktop, I can't say that I'm impressed.

Apple still holds the advantage that they just need to target a very small set of hardware configurations, all of which they have designed and control. It does still allow them to build the most pleasant desktop experience of all the current offering, even with less amazing hardware (mostly their GPU).

But this is HN, what people probably mean is: LLM are still better with an Nvidia GPU and neither Apples nor AMDs APIs and libraries are as good as Nvidias CUDA.

>It does still allow them to build the most pleasant desktop experience of all the current offering

I wouldn't call MacOs desktop experience as most pleasant. Not if you are a power user.

In what way? Can you elaborate?

From a poweruser PoV, the only complaint I have with MacOS is its lackluster tiling support which I need to install separate applications to fix.

What do you use or recommend for tiling?

I don’t experience this difference with Windows vs Mac performance. Actually my desktop machine is much faster in most tasks than the similar vintage M1 Macbook Pro I use for work. Probably mostly due to faster storage in the desktop.