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Windows Laptop Makers 'Worried' About New MacBook Air Impacting Sales
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Does the typical consumer care about the speed of the M2 chip? I know people who frequent Macrumors obviously do, but I wasn't aware the typical person cared. As an Apple shareholder and user though, I'd love to see Mac market share grow.
MacOS also has no professional engineering software so not much better than Chromebooks. There are several of these Windows only software mentioned on Apple jobs listing page (eg. Mac Product Design CAD Engineer, Digital Layout Designer, etc.) that are used to design Apple products. Replacing my M1 MBA when 5nm Intel Meteor Lake or AMD Ryzen 7000 comes out.
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Jesus that's a terrible laptop screen, only 1920 by 1080? The OLD Macbook Air has a 2560-by-1600 screen.
And the M2 smokes the AMD Ryzen 5800H, 1819/8928 single/multi-core crushes 1330/7050.
AMD Ryzen 7 5800H Benchmarks - Geekbench
browser.geekbench.com
And a laptop with terrible battery life (and requires fans) because it uses so much power should have performance advantage over a laptop built for long untethered use, not be 20% to 30% behind.
Hmm, so how can you explain why PC sales are declining and Mac sales are growing significantly, and why Apple dominates high end PC sales?
Maybe you should find out about all the apps that creative professionals use that are much better and faster on Macs than on Windows...
That's a useless amateur synthetic benchmark. Here's Blender 3D rendering where 5800H is ahead of M1 Pro CPU and destroys it on GPU (70W 3060 mobile) at a fraction of the cost.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/3d-rendering-on-apple-silicon-cpu-gpu.2269416/post-30676733
(lower time is faster/better)
7.23s - Nvidia 3080ti (GPU OptiX Blender Linux Mint 20)
8.21s - Nvidia 3080ti (GPU OptiX Blender Windows 10)
13.13s - Nvidia 3080 mobile (GPU OptiX Blender)
16.39s - Nvidia 3060 70W mobile (GPU OptiX Blender 3.0)
18.84s - AMD 6900xt (GPU HIP Blender 3.2)
24.04s - AMD 6800 (GPU HIP Blender 3.2)
29s - 2070 Super (GPU OptiX)
34s - M1 Ultra 20CPU 64GPU (GPU Metal Blender 3.1)
37s - M1 Ultra 20CPU 48GPU (GPU Metal Blender 3.1)
42.79s - M1 Max 32GPU (GPU Metal Blender 3.1 alpha)
48s - M1 Max 24GPU (GPU Metal Blender 3.1 alpha + patch)
51s - Nvidia 2070 Super (GPU CUDA)
1m18.34s - M1 Pro 16GPU (GPU Metal Blender 3.1 alpha + patch)
1m35.21s - AMD 5950X (CPU Blender 3.0)
1m43s - M1 Ultra 20CPU 64GPU (CPU Blender 3.1)
1m50s - M1 Ultra 20CPU 48GPU (CPU Blender 3.1)
2m0.04s - Mac Mini M1 (GPU Metal Blender 3.1 alpha + patch)
2m48.03s - MBA M1 7GPU (GPU Metal Blender 3.1 alpha)
3m55.81s - AMD 5800H base clock no-boost and no-PBO overclock (CPU Blender 3.0)
4m11s - M1 Pro (CPU Blender 3.1 alpha)
5m51.06s - MBA M1 (CPU Blender 3.0)
I did for a time (see my signature for the exact model). And for a while, it served as my main machine at home. After a period though, the user experience to me wasn't as 'fluid' or 'cohesive' as macOS was (if that makes sense). And when I found I could buy an external SSD and just boot off that, that injected new life into my existing machines (which are ancient by Apple standards and equipped with old school HDs).
Since then, my interests have changed and I no longer game which is why I'm looking forward to the new Air
Getting rid of my M1 MBA since there's no software for it so not much better than Chromebook. Plus MacOS is too gimped. For example, on battery downloads stop when screen goes to sleep on MBA and there's no system setting to override that so have to use a command-line tool. Just hackintosh a PC if you want trial MacOS.
LOL, you are the king of misleading benchmarks. Blender wasn't optimized for the M1 when those were made.
And the cheapest one of those NVidia GPUs cost more than an entire M1 Ultra SOC.
It's a collection of results other people submitted on that thread plus personal ones. Blender has gotten slower with newer MacOS releases on my M1 MBA. 5800H + 3060 laptop costs about the same as M1 MBA 16GB or less but significantly faster with GPU rendering, compute, gaming (90-100fps vs 20fps), etc.
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'eh? My M1 Air downloads just fine over wifi on battery and the screen sleeps, it also backs up to the cloud same settings. Transfers aren't interrupted by the OS at all. Closing the lid, that's another matter. Maybe if you understood the MacOS better you could change your settings.
“Sources” say they are worried. That’s the difference. A whole two paragraphs dedicated to this, followed by a sales pitch for MacBooks and a history lesson on the switch to ARM.
Crap article.
Is it your first time using Macs? Apple 'caffeinate' command-line tool is a work-around for that gimped MacOS behavior so, for example, allows Steam downloads to continue when screen goes to sleep on battery. Otherwise, have to set the screen to never sleep and drain the battery.
https://www.theapplegeek.co.uk/blog/caffeinate
I really don't picture "most" consumers even understanding most claims by computer manufacturers. To the average person, they'll be driven by price, and word of mouth. The "halo" effect of iPhones / etc would also be a factor, but I don't see the M2 chip as convincing anyone except maybe the enlightened PC user - intrigued by the new claims, and able to understand them - from trying to change to Mac...
and that tells you how crappy Blender is, doesn’t it?
Listen kid. Do you not understand why Apple does not put nVidia cards in their laptops? They could benchmark just as high on esoteric benchmarks like this, and battery life would decline by 75%.
Go look at creative professionals and their workflows, and you’ll see how Apple Silicon crushes on benchmarks. That’s who Apple cares about. And it’s working given they are taking market share at the highest rate in the business.
My teen daughters use blender. Apple may lose them if they ever decide to prioritize blender over photoshop and illustrator. I don’t think Apple cares.
Apple is now in a position where it has the best of both worlds. Making their own processors means they have a unique point of differentiation, and they don’t have to pay Intel’s prices for processors.
This headline is probably overly sensationalist, but it wouldn’t be the first time Apple uses a superior user experience to monopolise the lion’s share of profits in a market, leaving only scraps for everyone else to fight over.
This headline is probably overly sensationalist, but it wouldn’t be the first time Apple uses a superior user experience to monopolise the lion’s share of profits in a market, leaving only scraps for everyone else to fight over.
Reflects on Apple if that's the case since they fund it and also provide developers to work on it. Reality is Apple hardware is just underperforming compared to discrete GPUs.
https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-development-fund/
LoL, it's way better than the screen of any Macbook Air, it's actually looks phenomenal in real life.
The resolution is not small at all for that size.
No it doesn't at all really. Geekbench is a terrible benchmarks for X86 CPU and it generally scales really poorly in multicore and is has such a short run that it doesn't really saturate the CPU cores like a proper benchmark should.
Also there was no M2 Macbook avilable when I bought my laptop although I would still chose it in the detriment on an M2 air which would now be at least 200$ for the 8/256 base configuration, LoL.
The battery life is fine for a laptop of that size. I can get 7 hours of web browsing. The battery life is not great because the battery is small for a 15.6' laptop.
And of couse it has fans, it's a high performance laptop with a dedicated GPU that can boost up to 100W max power. It's not a toy.
It’s Apple hardware that’s the problem yet it used to work better? That makes no sense.
Blender is just another example of open source crapware. It’s focused on other platforms. It’s great that Apple very recently offered to help, that’s a great sign for better performance in the future.
But again, Apple is focused on creative professionals, and Apple Silicon offers them the best available performance gor their tools.
Rendering is a small subset of their market. I have no doubt they will get much better at it, but I doubt they will be able to match high end thousand dollar+ discrete GPUs in every use case with an integrated GPU.
Half as many pixels is “way better”? Uh, ok. And OLED with only 400 nits?
And Geekbench is the standard of CPU benchmarks, it’s been around long before Apple Silicon and does nothing to favor AS over any other CPU. Everyone loves a fair benchmark until they find their favorite CPU does poorly on it. And in your case Geekbench operates your laptop because it throttles do quickly.
Lastly, if it’s not a toy why is it made out of plastic?
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