One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.
A lot of people say that you can get X laptop with similar specs for $600 or whatever. But they usually have shit screens or are made from cheap plastic.
I still think Apple is a bit expensive, but a comparable windows laptop is not too much cheaper in most cases.
Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.
But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.
It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.
Not the person you responded to, but my m1 max macbook pro is used to dry run changes to my kubernetes cluster by running 4 virtual machines and networking them. My previous pc could pull it off fine, but my macbook can run a virtual cluster for hours on battery.
Because of the unified memory, you can use all of your ram as video ram for the purposes of running a massive LLM if you want local AI. there’s a plugin I run for VScode that emulates github copilot but runs entirely on device and offline.
Apple’s ARM implementation is really nice for getting a lot of specific work done. Mine spends most workdays docked and being used as my primary workstation.
Yeah it’s the package. The semi broken entryspec mbp from 2015 I got to repair and keep has a mousepad that is at least on par with my current 2 yo high tier thinkpad. Now take a laptop from that era and the difference becomes more noticeable.
It’s just hard to trust them. So - buying an Apple laptop to install Linux there? Doesn’t seem to make much sense, though Linus Torvalds seems to be of a different opinion.
One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.
A lot of people say that you can get X laptop with similar specs for $600 or whatever. But they usually have shit screens or are made from cheap plastic.
I still think Apple is a bit expensive, but a comparable windows laptop is not too much cheaper in most cases.
Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.
But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.
It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.
Just curious about what you do that needs 64gb ram?
Not the person you responded to, but my m1 max macbook pro is used to dry run changes to my kubernetes cluster by running 4 virtual machines and networking them. My previous pc could pull it off fine, but my macbook can run a virtual cluster for hours on battery.
Because of the unified memory, you can use all of your ram as video ram for the purposes of running a massive LLM if you want local AI. there’s a plugin I run for VScode that emulates github copilot but runs entirely on device and offline.
Apple’s ARM implementation is really nice for getting a lot of specific work done. Mine spends most workdays docked and being used as my primary workstation.
Lots of chrome, 1 VM with 8 gigs of ram. I was using > 28 gigs of ram on my old laptop so when I got my new one I made sure to get 64.
Yeah it’s the package. The semi broken entryspec mbp from 2015 I got to repair and keep has a mousepad that is at least on par with my current 2 yo high tier thinkpad. Now take a laptop from that era and the difference becomes more noticeable.
It’s just hard to trust them. So - buying an Apple laptop to install Linux there? Doesn’t seem to make much sense, though Linus Torvalds seems to be of a different opinion.