For some people comparing to Apple is useless - Macbooks could be a thousand times faster and last for a year on battery, they still would be 100% useless to me because they don't run the software I need on a daily basis.
A YouTuber, Luke Miani, gave it a try recently. Of course it doesn't work, but it was interesting to see that mechanically everything fits and the chassis is of course practically identical, but it doesn't work because FU that's why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_jckhYfGBw
I think 18 days ago you might have said something to the the tune of you’d never do business with Apple again. You changed your mind fast. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188366
Does it matter? I have a Threadripper 3970x and an M1 Macbook Air. For anything that can't use more than 4 cores, the M1 crushes it. The Threadripper also draws over 100W at idle.
Whatever AMD and Intel have right now are completely irrelevant, and I say that as one of the biggest haters of OS X there is.
I'm not trading in my workstation for a Mac Studio or whatever, though, because I'm guessing AMD's 5nm chips will probably perform even better than the M1/M2. Plus games. Games are nice.
For a site about "hacker" news, this comment is wild to me.
It seems we've truly reached the apex of disposable consumer culture, where even our most powerful technology is something we just throw in the trash and re-purchase when something fails or newer technology becomes available.
I can only hope that companies like Framework can reverse some of this trend. Because as it stands, our already unsustainable culture has gotten to the point where it seems folks no longer remember that anything else is possible, or why we might want to think differently.
I guess "stuff" isn't really the problem with the current society. If you write software for a living, the company that has a 50% faster hack/test/ship cycle is the one that wins the market. It is a shame that you have to throw away a power supply, keyboard, and screen every few years to get that faster cycle, and Framework helps there.
But at the same time, the chips that Framework uses waste valuable electricity and don't perform particularly well. That's just where Intel is at right now. That is likely to change, and Framework is interesting from the standpoint of "when Intel gets their act together, look at our balance of performance and sustainability". That's not where they're at right now, though. Not Frameworks' fault; nobody is selling mobile arm64 chips that have remotely competitive performance. It's the late 1970s again; hopefully the clones show up to kill "IBM" again.
Realistically, people are burning the rainforest to sell pictures of smoking monkeys and burn dead dinosaurs to drive to get coffee every morning. Recycling your laptop's screen every 5 years is not really making a dent into our current planet-killing habits. It feels good to help in a small way, but what feels good is not necessarily meaningful.
> But at the same time, the chips that Framework uses waste valuable electricity
I pretty well guarantee you the small amount of energy saved by operating an M1 is more than made up for by the cost of manufacturing and shipping a new laptop every few years as part of the Apple replacement cycle.
> Recycling your laptop's screen every 5 years
You might want to do a little research about what's involved in upgrading a framework mainboard. Far far more than just the screen is "recycled" when upgrading a machine like that.
And that's ignoring the ability to reuse or resell components outside of the Framework chassis. I fully expect to turn my old mainboard into a server when the time comes to eventually upgrade it.
> It feels good to help in a small way, but what feels good is not necessarily meaningful.
This is a classic thought-killing argument intended to invalidate any kind of individual action or intervention. "Well, what little thing I do has no meaningful impact in the big picture, so why bother."
The answer to that is simple: Government needs to pass laws mandating right to repair. It's long past time that companies like Apple be forced to do the right thing, because it's clear they're not going to do it themselves, particularly when consumers have apparently convinced themselves that their individual choices don't matter.
From the Cinebench scores in the linked post vs some M2 benchmarks, the M2 (score of 1695) is comparable to the bottom tier 12th gen Framework in the single core benchmark (framework scores: [1691, 1723, 1839]. On the multi-core benchmark, the M2 is significantly worse- 8714 vs [9631, 10027, 11076].
The main advantage of the M2s is probably battery life.
Cinebench is a terrible benchmark and heavily favors CPUs that have many slow CPU cores.
Also, Cinebench is not optimized for ARM instructions.
If you are buying a computer to use Cinema4D or gaming, Intel and and AMD will be better. If you're buying a computer to do just about everything else, then Apple is better.
M2 is faster in ST, GPU, AI, and video editing. It's slower on MT. To me, the M2 is overall faster. Especially when unplugged which will cause Alder Lake to significantly drop in performance.
> Especially when unplugged which will cause Alder Lake to significantly drop in performance.
At least in a laptop, it's not just when you unplug the laptop that performance drops. You've also got to have enough volume in the laptop to shoehorn in a major cooling system if you're going to keep the P series processors from throttling.
For instance, Lenovo's thin and light ThinkPad X1 Yoga has two fans but still throttles:
>Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads.
>the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot.
After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
