Well, what PC people do is they hyper-focus on one specific spec like number of displays supported or price per GB of RAM but can’t see the forest for the trees beyond that.
If I just do the same thing with Macs I can win arguments just as easily. Find me a laptop with the kind of performance per watt specs as the M3 systems. Find another laptop of the same size/weight/power draw that can match the M3 Max’s performance at anything close to the same battery life. Find me a completely fanless Intel/AMD PC that performs as well as the MacBook Air and gets the same or better battery life. Find me a PC laptop where you can feed a RTX 40X0 mobile GPU with over 100GB of RAM. Find me another laptop that uses TSMC’s most advanced chip lithography.
PC spec monkeys will basically say it’s not a real laptop because it can’t support 800 external monitors and there’s no print screen key and it doesn’t have a parallel port etc etc. These are all specs that don’t matter to 99% of users.
Hell, if you’re the kind of person who has a triple or quad external monitor setup, that means you’ve spent around $1000 on just displays. That probably means you can afford $3,000 for a MacBook Pro with a Max chip or maybe pay $2,000 for a used one. And if you didn’t spend $1000+ on those displays, that means those four displays are probably so bad that you’re better off looking at one 4K display or two decent quality ultrawide displays.
> Well, what PC people do is they hyper-focus on one specific spec like number of displays supported or price per GB of RAM but can’t see the forest for the trees beyond that.
Not at all, there are many examples of various types of specs in this thread, where apple fanboys suddenly go mute :)
> If I just do the same thing I can win arguments just as easily. Find me a laptop with the kind of performance per watt specs as the M3 systems. Find another laptop of the same size/weight/power draw that can match the M3 Max’s performance at anything close to the same battery life.
So the only example you can come up with is performance per watt? (Your second question is basically the same as your first). M3 very good in that category, I don't disagree, it's apple's latest/best processor, and it does slightly outperform AMD Ryzens in that category[0]. Of course, when you take price into account, apple M processors are not even close to best :).
> Find me a PC laptop where you can feed an RTX 4080 mobile with over 100GB of RAM
Hilarious that you bring this up when macs don't even support CUDA and basically useless when it comes to the the most important aspects of having a GPU today... gaming and deep learning...
> Those laptops don’t exist, unless it’s a Mac.
Yeah, nothing but apple exists in an apple fanboy's mind.
So what you’re saying is you can’t find a better performance per watt, AMD “comes close.”
You are doing the spec monkey thing again. You changed the spec. I chose performance per watt and now you’ve changed it to performance per dollar.
Under a performance per dollar logic AMD makes the best PC graphics card on the market, which they obviously don’t in terms of total performance. Nvidia charges a huge price/performance premium on the RTX4090 because you can’t buy that performance elsewhere. Sound familiar?
> So the only example you can come up with is performance per watt
I’ve got another one: media encoding. Apple’s systems obliterate the rest.
If your argument is that CUDA is important I hate to say it but you’re actually reverting to that whole “product ecosystem and experience” angle that you were deriding in the same breath. Nvidia users have to buy Nvidia because it’s the only way to use Nvidia software. Kind of like how iOS developers and Final Cut Pro users must buy a Mac? “Yeah, nothing but apple exists in an apple fanboy's mind.” You could replace that statement with “Nvidia” under your own preferences.
Under the spec monkey argument someone buying a graphics card should ignore Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem and buy an AMD graphics card that offers better performance per dollar. But you’re saying that the lack of CUDA on a Mac is a major downside. Which is it? Performance per dollar or user experience and ecosystem?
This is why doing the spec monkey thing turns us around and around in circles. I’m not being an Apple fanboy I’m just pointing out how it’s completely reasonable for an expensive computer to not prioritize supporting a zillion monitors.
I never claimed that any particular single spec makes macbooks bad, that was entirely your own strawman :). There are maaaaany reasons why I think they're bad.
> I’m not being an Apple fanboy I’m just pointing out how it’s completely reasonable for an expensive computer to not prioritize supporting a zillion monitors.
My 9 year old asus laptop has better external monitor support than my m2 macbook pro... these problems were basically solved 10 ago... how hard can it be? How much do you have to 'prioritize' this? How hard is it to solve the many years-old annoying, well-known macos bugs? I don't see innovation or engineering quality coming out of apple (the only exception being (the very recent) M line of CPUs)... everything else is meh - buggy, fragile, locked-in, overpriced, non-standard, lack of support for important stuff like CUDA, etc.
If I just do the same thing with Macs I can win arguments just as easily. Find me a laptop with the kind of performance per watt specs as the M3 systems. Find another laptop of the same size/weight/power draw that can match the M3 Max’s performance at anything close to the same battery life. Find me a completely fanless Intel/AMD PC that performs as well as the MacBook Air and gets the same or better battery life. Find me a PC laptop where you can feed a RTX 40X0 mobile GPU with over 100GB of RAM. Find me another laptop that uses TSMC’s most advanced chip lithography.
PC spec monkeys will basically say it’s not a real laptop because it can’t support 800 external monitors and there’s no print screen key and it doesn’t have a parallel port etc etc. These are all specs that don’t matter to 99% of users.
Hell, if you’re the kind of person who has a triple or quad external monitor setup, that means you’ve spent around $1000 on just displays. That probably means you can afford $3,000 for a MacBook Pro with a Max chip or maybe pay $2,000 for a used one. And if you didn’t spend $1000+ on those displays, that means those four displays are probably so bad that you’re better off looking at one 4K display or two decent quality ultrawide displays.