Boring Is What We Wanted

There are no benchmarked samples yet.

I'd love Intel to do well with this, but Intel has disappointed before.

I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's including an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.

Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound; the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better, but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of amps coursing through them.

Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not getting the M4 Pro.

Yes, Macs have incredible compute/watt, display quality, and design. However, I like to think of myself as logical, and I would not buy a Mac.

Given the choice between a M5 Mac and a latest-gen ThinkPad, I would not take the Mac. That is fine, and so are people who would do the opposite. We are just looking for different qualities in our computer.

It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that. (No Windows means that the battery life hit is relatively light. FWIW, there's no chance I would buy a computer locked down to Windows either.)

I also value non-commitment to a particular ecosystem so I prefer not to buy Apple, because I think a significant amount of the device's value is in how seamlessly it integrates with other Apple devices.

However, one day in the future when many of my beliefs have become "bought out", perhaps my priorities will change and I will go all in on the ecosystem. That's OK as well.

I hope that Intel does well in the future. It's better for us all if more than one company can push the boundaries on fabrication.

I also remember the days when the shoe was on the other foot. Motorola or IBM was going to put out a processor that would decimate Intel - it was always a year away. Meanwhile, Intel kept pushing the P6 architecture (Pentium Pro to Pentium 3) and then NetBurst (Pentium 4) and then Core. Apple keeps improving its M-series processors and single-core speed is up 80% since the M1 and 25% faster than the fastest desktop processor from AMD and 31% faster than the fastest desktop processor from Intel.

I'd love for Panther Lake to be amazing. It will put pressure on Apple to offer better performance for my dollar. Some of performance is how much CPU a company is willing to give me at a price point and what margins they'll accept. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer more cores at a cheaper price, that's a win for Apple users. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer 2nm processors quicker (at higher cost to them), that's a win for Apple users.

But I'm also skeptical of Intel. They kept promising 10nm for years and failed. They've done a bit better lately, but they've also stumbled a lot and they're way behind their roadmap. What kind of volume will we see for Panther Lake? What prices? It's hard to compare a hopeful product to something that actually exists today. Part of it isn't just whether Intel can make 18A chips, but how fast can they produce them. If most of Intel's laptop, desktop, and server processors in 2026 aren't 18A, then it isn't the same win. And before someone says "Apple is just a niche manufacturer," they aren't anymore. Apple is making CPUs for every iPhone in addition to Macs so it has to be able to get CPUs manufactured at a very high scale - around the same scale as the Intel's CPU market.

I hope Intel can do wonderfully, but given how much Intel has overpromised and underdelivered, I'm definitely not taking their word for it.

Or I could drive across town and have a monitor today and pay $60 for the aluminum shell that hides dust better.

Valve is spending a lot of resources and AFAIK so are all the AI companies in the asian market.

There are plenty of people who wants an open-source alternative that breaks the monopoly that Nvidia has over CUDA.

They shipped something similar in macOS 26 - native Linux container support.

You're better off using MacOS built native unix binaries and a VM or docker.

I never noticed ads in notifications, unlike with Windows which is ads infested everywhere now.

I agree that better GPU support would be nice, but also better Metal support in common open source would be nice, since I'm a laptop user.

The de facto answer is Homebrew — even internally at Apple. They just can’t publicly say it without liability issues.

> If they're trying to get me to switch off Linux

It’s important to know that Apple is not trying to get you to switch from Linux. Converting “UNIX workstation” people was an effort of theirs circa 2001 but that marketing campaign is long over with.

Their targets are consumer, prosumers, and media/influencer people. They give app developers just enough attention to keep their App Store revenue healthy.

Plan your long-term computing needs accordingly. You’ll see what I mean in the next 12-24 months.

If you want the OS with all the shit you do (and don't) need, then maybe Windows is for you. ;-)

What things are you finding that aren’t that way?

Rectangle is great, Ghostty is great, I too install something to tweak the mouse speed/acceleration curve (don't remember which one).

Do we need all these bundled in? Generally a dedicated developer can make those much better than whatever they'd do in-house.

I'd say where it would be an issue is if you cannot make an app that gives you the behavior you want because the OS is missing the necessary APIs and configuration toggles needed too.

I own an AVP, and I agree. Now I bought it secondhand for half the price, so I acknowledge that necessarily means there is at least one counterparty out there who disagrees.

Using the AVP for one work day, once I got the right fit and optical inserts, was such an eye opener. It’s like using an ultraportable laptop after living an entire life with large CRT monitors & desktop rigs tied to an actual desk. An experience, btw, which also lived through. It just radially opened my eyes to fresh new possibilities and interaction mechanisms I never before thought possible.

But at $3.5k? No sane company exec could have been serious in thinking that would take off.

If it was by design excellence and truly providing a better proposition it would sweeten the pill, but as of now it would be only because the way better products are from a company everyone hates.

In a weird way, Meta has been good at balancing hardware lockdown, and I'd see a better future with them leading the pack and allowing for better alternatives to come up along the way. Basically the same way the Quest allowed for exploration, and extended the PCVR market enough for it to survive up to this point. That wouldn't happen with Apple domining the field.

These decisions IMHO fall on the hardware team, and they're not doing a good job IMHO. Meta's hardware team is arguably pulling more weight, as much as we can hate Meta for being Meta.

> headphones

Here again, the reception wasn't that great. The most recent airPod Pro was a mixed bag, the airPod max had most of the flaws of the Vision Pro and they didn't learn anything from it.

> camera

The best smartphone cameras aren't the iPhone by far now, they're losing to the Chinese makers, but don't have to compete as the market is segmented.

> MacBook and iPad are almost as thin

I wouldn't put the relentless focus on thinness as a net positive though.

All in all I'm not saying they're slacking, I'm arguing they lost the plot on many fronts and their product design is lagging behind in many ways. Apple will stay the top dog by sheer money (even just keeping TSMC in their pocket) and inertia, but I wouldn't be praising their teams as much as you do.

Side note, rossmann has stopped talking about Apple because he is not longer focused on Apple repair and is turning his attention to other causes not because of apple's "repairability" changes which are still a token gesture.

Sprinkle with crashes and bugs that are never fixed and charge a premium.

[I get your point; I just refuse to consider to a ridiculous reskin no one asked for to be a “feature.”]

When Snow Leopard came out it was very buggy, and many apps simply did not run on it. I've been a Mac user since 1993, and I think it's the only version of macOS I ever downgraded from. Don't get me wrong, it eventually became rock solid, the apps I needed were eventually upgraded, and it became a great OS.

But let's not mistake MacOS 10.6.8 for MacOS 10.6.0. And maybe let's not compare macOS 26.0 to MacOS 10.6.8 either, it's not quite fair. Ever since Snow Leopard I've been waiting at least 6 months before upgrading macOS. I don't intend to change that rule anytime soon...

You shouldn't and nobody is asking you to. Apple can sell their new computers to billions of prospective customers who wish to upgrade from x86 or buy their first computer.

The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture.

Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.

I’m sure Intel had some releases each year, but did they have the right ones to make it possible for Apple to release an update?

And then Skylake's successors, which were broadly the same as Skylake for about four years.

Perhaps it’s just a language slip, how are people forced to upgrade every year? My experience is the opposite: ios 15 is still supported[0] and my 2016 iPhone let me access the World Wide Web.

The force your talking about comes instead from developers (like me) that implements features and systems always more CPU/GPU hungry.

0 security patched last month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108

People who upgrade every year don't do it for technical needs. We're long past the times when phones were inadequate and yearly improvements were big leaps that made them less unusable.

Yearly phone upgrades are just to sport the latest model, symbolizes status. Or if there's some deal where you can do it for close to no cost, better than long upgrade cycles, but I don't think "free upgrades" are common.

The capitalist class truly are leaches.

If they had done that from the beginning, I think the reception to Touch Bar would have been a lot more positive.

When you used the Terminal app, there was literally a "man" button that would open the relevant man page (for whatever command you currently had typed) in a new window.

Actually an awesome feature if application authors got on board.

Making the power button part of the bar instead of a physical button sucked though.

Maker has a specific connotation, but technically still fits on the GP.

Examples include Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, etc etc.

I have 64GBs of RAM in my Macbook Pro. I load a 48GB DuckDB to RAM and run real-time, split-second, complex, unique analysis using Polars and Superset. Nothing like this was possible before unless I had a supercomputer.