I really needed a laptop that was decently-powerful and had a long battery life, so I bit the bullet and bought an M4 Macbook Pro.
I still use Windows 90+ % of the time, as all of the desktops in my home and office are Windows, and I find it difficult and annoying to have to go back and forth between the different interfaces. Even things like the close/maximize buttons being on the left versus right side of the app window, and the clock being on the top/button is enough to drive me nuts.
In an ideal world, I would be able to find a Windows laptop that could do what a Macbook Pro does, but from what I’ve researched, the Snapdragon Windows laptops still have a way to go, if that will ever even be a reality at all.
Do you guys project that Windows Snapdragon laptops will ever get near the performance/reliability/battery life of the M-Chip Macs?
At some point yes, but I would estimate 3-5+ years. Intels lunar lake is the closest there is now but it competes more with the m chip and is less powerful than m pro/max.
Factors in apples favour:
they have an amazing economy of scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if their unibody case is as cheap to make than a crappy plastic Acer, and much cheaper than most premium xps/thinkpad/… They have the volume to bankroll TSM giving them a lasting 1-node generation advantage.
Vertical integration works for them. It saves them a lot of money not to have to give intel a 50% margin on SoCs. It is a risky strategy though. If they screw up one component they will be lost.
They’re not Microsoft. While Microsoft’s main selling point is backwards compatibility, they have screwed up a transition to ARM for the second time now. Apple had a pretty seamless transition.
Their chip design actually is good. IPC is through the roof at possibly 20% higher than competition (if I remember correctly).
Factors limiting competitors:
AMD is doing well and can get somewhat close to apples efficiency at load, the system integration is much worse. Think of the software support, idle power, etc.
Intels lunar lake looks amazing and actually gets close in idle power and low load efficiency. But they’re lacking strategy. There’s no high performance lunar lake and rumours are they won’t repeat this kind of architecture with on package RAM. They might lack resources to catch up in the short term.
Qualcomm brought a pretty good product but integration is lacking. No Linux support yet and either their software team or Microsoft are ruining it. Not unlike both intel and AMDs latest chips having issues on windows 11…
I would hope so. I use Linux on my ThinkPad X1 (8th gen Intel) and I really long for the day there is a laptop that has idle power consumption similar to a MacBook/iPad that can resume from sleep near instantly. It is so nice to come back to my iPad after not touching it for several hours or even a day or two, it unlocks instantly and the battery percentage is nearly unchanged since I last used it. I get the sense a lot of this is possible from the extremely low idle power consumption of the apple M-series and A-series chips.
I would love to combine the benefits above with the typical Thinkpad benefits of Linux compatibility, and user-replaceable battery, SSD and perhaps memory.
Honestly, it’s impossible to predict where tech will be in the next 5 years. Could anyone have predicted Intel’s or AMD’s CPU breakthroughs (or their screwups)? One could have maybe predicted Apple’s moves to an extent given the rapid pace of their Apple Silicon development for mobile devices, and them alluding to their architecture being “desktop class” many years before unveiling a desktop chip. But at the time, few people took it seriously, aside from observant analysts like those at AnandTech. Even though Apple made the best mobile CPUs, they would never try to stuff those into a PC and transition the macOS ecosystem from x86 to ARM… right?
But here are some tidbits just for fun:
Phoronix recently benchmarked Apple’s entry level M4 16GB desktop ($500 with education discount lol) running macOS vs Ubuntu Linux running on some new x86 CPUs with 32-64GB RAM and massively faster SSDs – hugely more expensive systems.
The x86 stuff looked… underwhelming…
Meanwhile Snapdragon X Elite execution has been poor. Qualcomm cancelled their promised devkit because it “comprehensively failed to meet standards.” And lacklustre Windows ARM efforts haven’t helped. Neither developers, nor end users, have any real reason to make a mass transition to Windows on ARM given the present track record. Intel and AMD aren’t exactly standing still, too. All in all, there’s no epic technical benefit that could entice people to change, and no ecosystem control to coordinate it, while Apple had both.
One player I’m keeping an eye out for is Nvidia. There are reports that they intend to enter the PC SoC market and they have been hiring away some good talent from their competitors. Given Nvidia’s track record, it is more likely than not that they will have a good product eventually. Probably will still be an uphill battle to have it be successful in the market, however.
What I can almost guarantee is that you will get used to the macOS UX way before any of this could happen! I hated it when I first switched to macOS for work. It took me maybe a year to get used to it. It no longer bothers me that it is different; it feels like in some cases it is better than Windows or GNOME. In some cases if feels a bit worse but it’s not a deal breaker. A lot of it is just about learning the new shortcuts and such to make the best use of what you have.
Yeah that’s an interesting one. The big question is Microsoft’s exclusivity deal with Qualcomm… It would be potentially amazing for linux users if support is there. But I’m not sure if nvidia will go all out on a PC SoC if it won’t be able to run windows?
Maybe more likely an SoC for handheld gaming or a new nvidia shield?