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Re:MacBook Air M4 by carlhjerpe on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:20AM (#43276676)
Yeah everyone that went from "old shitty Intel" to M1 or above somehow gaslit themselves into believing nobody could catch up.

AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...

Re:MacBook Air M4 by danieldk on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:47AM (#43276814)
T14 Gen 5 AMD has replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and WWAN. Just got one for Linux (besides my MacBook) and loaded it up with 64GB RAM (which was only 160 Euro) and a 2TB SSD.
Re:MacBook Air M4 by poink on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:34AM (#43276742)
I don't think they "gaslit themselves," but I do think M1 was good enough a lot of people stopped thinking about hardware and their frame of reference is horribly out of date
Re:MacBook Air M4 by felixgallo on Thursday March 06, 2025 @02:58AM (#43277629)
Also it can’t be understated how bad Windows has gotten and what that trajectory looks like.
Re:MacBook Air M4 by freehorse on Thursday March 06, 2025 @04:45AM (#43278248)
I had never really used a mac (or anything from apple) before M1, and since I got an M1 air I never looked back. Not all people who are hyped about apple silicon were previously apple users.

It is true though that in terms of laptops my only experience to compare it with was with intel chips, but that's because it used to be hard to find an AMD laptop back then.

Re:MacBook Air M4 by spaceman_2020 on Thursday March 06, 2025 @07:59AM (#43279707)
The problem is that those AMDs still have to run something as awful as Windows 11
Re:MacBook Air M4 by carlhjerpe on Thursday March 06, 2025 @08:06AM (#43279761)
In the context of software development, I run Linux on those AMDs and it's a great experience. It's not for everyone and I respect that, but it's not too hard these days.

Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.

Re:MacBook Air M4 by int_19h on Thursday March 06, 2025 @04:40PM (#43285336)
The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4.

The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background.

On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes.

On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes.

Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.

Re:MacBook Air M4 by deaddodo on Monday March 10, 2025 @06:46PM (#43326995)
I had a 2023 ASUS Zephyrus G14 (AMD 6800 + 6900HD dGPU) and I took a battery hit, but not near what you saw. Somewhere closer to 20-25%.

It’s bigger problem was it was far too eager to trigger the dGPU, especially with accelerated graphics in browsers and the like. So I ended up running it in integrated only mode, unless I wanted to play games.

Re:MacBook Air M4 by PcChip on Thursday March 06, 2025 @08:13AM (#43279811)
I have fedora on an all amd laptop and it’s wonderful
Re:MacBook Air M4 by ThatMedicIsASpy on Thursday March 06, 2025 @08:49AM (#43280144)
The problem with Apple is there is this awful MacOS along with the walled garden company called apple. The Problem with windows is.. none I can install my own.