Lemdro.id

-3 points

10 months ago

I was referring to the desktop space.

Is that still even a thing? Between hybrid working and flex desking, who still uses desktop PC’s?

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Buddahriffic@lemmy.world

4 points

10 months ago

Gamers and custom builders. We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn’t able to keep up with the company’s needs.

The very top of personal computing is still desktops. And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there’s a premium you pay for the smaller package. Custom laptops are becoming more common but the size still limits choices you can make.

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-3 points

10 months ago

Gamers and custom builders.

Tiny niche market.

We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn’t able to keep up with the company’s needs.

We just run all that stuff in the cloud, much easier to scale up and down.

And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there’s a premium you pay for the smaller package.

Yeah, but does it matter? You can get a decked out MacBook Pro for less than €5k, that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. You can’t bring a desktop computer into a meeting, or to a customer, or home for a work from home day.

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CucumberFetish@lemm.ee

2 points

10 months ago

For the same price as a decked out MacBook m3, you can get a laptop with a i9-13980hx. That beats the m3 max in single core cinebench by 12% and in multi core cinebench by 29%.

Also, the laptops at that price point have a dedicated gpu.

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1 point

10 months ago

For the same price as a decked out MacBook m3, you can get a laptop with a i9-13980hx. That beats the m3 max in single core cinebench by 12% and in multi core cinebench by 29%.

And that laptop has a similar size, weight build quality, battery life, display resolution/peak brightness,etc ? Or is it a plastic fantastic ‘luggable’ behemoth that runs out in less than 2 hours and throttles almost immediately under load? Link to that mythical laptop please.

Also, the laptops at that price point have a dedicated gpu.

You say that like it’s a good thing. Discrete GPUs suck, especially for GPGPU tasks. Not having unified memory is killing for performance in anything but games. Copying data to/from VRAM is slow and discrete GPUs have very limited VRAM. Even a 4090 only has 24GB. Meanwhile you can spec out an M2 MacBook with 96GB RAM and have almost all of that available to the GPU.

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CucumberFetish@lemm.ee

1 point

10 months ago

There definitely are good build quality laptops out there, like the Zephyrus lineup. Don’t know about their latest releases, it would require a bit more research.

My own laptop is a 2022 model of zephyrus g15. It was released a few months before m2 released. The CPU is a Ryzen 9 6900HS, that is just 4-5% slower in cinebench, and a 3070-ti gpu. The GPU is 20% slower than m2 max, but the laptop also cost only 2.4k, compared to 3.1k of M2 max. The battery lasts around 4-5h during video playback on the dedicated GPU.

Haven’t tested the energy saving method as I use it for work and I have locked it to max power settings.

Yes, the mac is more power efficient, but at the same time, if I wanted a power efficient, light laptop, I wouldn’t buy a powerhouse.

Edit: oh, and the zephyrus laptop is actually lighter than 16" MacBook pro

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0 points

10 months ago

There definitely are good build quality laptops out there, like the Zephyrus lineup

Sure there are. That was not my point. My point was that when you buy an x86 laptop that ticks all the boxes that a MacBook does, you pay a similar or higher price.

My own laptop is a 2022 model of zephyrus g15. It was released a few months before m2 released. The CPU is a Ryzen 9 6900HS, that is just 4-5% slower in cinebench, and a 3070-ti gpu. The GPU is 20% slower than m2 max, but the laptop also cost only 2.4k, compared to 3.1k of M2 max. The battery lasts around 4-5h during video playback on the dedicated GPU.

Let’s compare it. Your laptop is a little cheaper, but it also has a 2560x1440 display with a peak brightness of 300 nits, compared to 3546x2234 with a peak of 1600 nits on a 16" MBPro. The MacBook has over twice the number of pixels and is over 5 times as bright. You get 4-5h video playback, the 16" MBPro gets 22 hours of video playback. The MBPro has 3 40Gbit Thunderbolt ports, yours has zero.

I’m not saying it’s a bad machine, but the higher price of the MBPro is justified by what you get.

Haven’t tested the energy saving method as I use it for work and I have locked it to max power settings.

Yet another thing I don’t have to waste any thoughts on, there is no such setting on the MBPro, it’s fast and power efficient. It also never throttles and is always silent. Can you say the same?

I have a 14" M1 Max, it’s driving 2 external displays (4k and a 5k2k) and is used as a development machine. I regularly run big compile jobs that really puts load on the system. I’m not sure if the fans even run, because I’ve never heard them.

Edit: oh, and the zephyrus laptop is actually lighter than 16" MacBook pro

Sure, it’s 200 grams lighter but it’s also a smaller laptop. 15.6" screen vs. 16.2" screen. The 14" model is lighter than the zephyrus with the exact same performance as the 16" model, just with a smaller screen and ‘only’ 17 hours of video playback on battery.

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