runnin away from Win

[4damind]

Yep and even then Lunar lake's early benchmarks looks like Intel's going to beat out Apple in the performance per watt terms over the coming months, this is also all before the ARM PC hardware lands. Apples had a couple of strong years with their hardware shift, but it's not as if the rest of the market is not paying attention.

Tom's Hardware had a chance to test a handful of Asus and Dell laptops powered by Intel's first Lunar Lake chips and they wrote: "The Lunar Lake laptops we've tested so far all perform slightly worse than the latest laptops with AMD and Apple chips in terms of single and multi-core performance."
And they "can't outlast the best laptops for battery life powered by Apple and Qualcomm silicon"

Source

[Kaine]

Tom's Hardware had a chance to test a handful of Asus and Dell laptops powered by Intel's first Lunar Lake chips and they wrote: "The Lunar Lake laptops we've tested so far all perform slightly worse than the latest laptops with AMD and Apple chips in terms of single and multi-core performance."
And they "can't outlast the best laptops for battery life powered by Apple and Qualcomm silicon"

Source

Fair enough, the articles I'd seen at that point were more generous.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/f ... ttery-life

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09 ... fe/#page-2

It's going to depend as to what battery is fitted to any given laptop as well. Apples are standardized, the PC ones' will be constrained by the shell design or how the manufacturer decides to allocate the build budget. Has anyone lined up a shell test yet that matches the battery size between the mac and pc?

[Jim Roseberry]

You can build a quiet 14900k or 9950x based PC DAW.
Any hyperbolic YouTube video that says otherwise is absolutely FOS.
I've been building PC DAWs professionally for 30+ years.

I've got the new $4000 Mac Studio here (to support clients).
Is it as fast (or as flexible) as a 14900k or 9950x custom build? No.

[4damind]

Fair enough, the articles I'd seen at that point were more generous.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/f ... ttery-life

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09 ... fe/#page-2

It's going to depend as to what battery is fitted to any given laptop as well. Apples are standardized, the PC ones' will be constrained by the shell design or how the manufacturer decides to allocate the build budget. Has anyone lined up a shell test yet that matches the battery size between the mac and pc?

The article from ArsTechnica says: "It's still frustrating that there's nothing on the PC side that can replicate Apple Silicon's combination of leading performance, leading power efficiency, and good software compatibility"

That pretty much sums it up and is similar to Tom's hardware summary. The best combination of performance and power efficiency is currently offered by Apple and that probably won't get any worse with the upcoming M4 (October?).

[Kaine]

The article from ArsTechnica says: "It's still frustrating that there's nothing on the PC side that can replicate Apple Silicon's combination of leading performance, leading power efficiency, and good software compatibility"

The article also goes on to say 16.5 hours under testing, which if you compare it to the Toms range test https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook- ... -they-last put's it about on par with M2 Pro 14" model.

Hands up through, I hadn't gone looking for the more recent battery test results on the newer models until looking after you commented, that's on me.

[4damind]

The article also goes on to say 16.5 hours under testing, which if you compare it to the Toms range test https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook- ... -they-last put's it about on par with M2 Pro 14" model.

Hands up through, I hadn't gone looking for the more recent battery test results on the newer models until looking after you commented, that's on me.

Yes, this article is a bit older... there is only one device (Panasonic Toughbook 40) that lasts more than 27 hours... which is described as a rugged laptop in briefcase format for first responders... so a bit special
The best Dell comes very close to Apple in the old article, but I mean it has a Core i5 10610U and that would have extremely poor performance compared to an 8-core M3.

The new article on the test with the Lunar Lake CPUs says: (Intel) still can't beat the best laptops with Apple and Qualcomm silicon for battery life.
Well, between Qualcomm and Apple, my choice would be very clear

[pekbro]

For me gaming is really the only attraction to windows. unix is my fav environment, even if
its only the dummbed down apple version.
Ive built pcs in that scored in the top 15 % of all the benchmarks around at the time, which was cool and all, but that only lasted about 15 mins (joke) before it was old hat.

[4damind]

That's the only thing I miss under MacOS... a kind of WSL like on Windows I used that for a long time for development with Nginx and it worked really well.
However, UTM (frontend for QEMU) runs pretty well and with it you can also run a complete Linux e.g. Debian for free or just Vmware Fusion Pro which is now free for private use...

[uOpt]

That's the only thing I miss under MacOS... a kind of WSL like on Windows I used that for a long time for development with Nginx and it worked really well.
However, UTM (frontend for QEMU) runs pretty well and with it you can also run a complete Linux e.g. Debian for free or just Vmware Fusion Pro which is now free for private use...

What's wrong with macOS with homebrew or Macports as a Unix?

[PAK]

Re Gaming.. Sequoia's AVX2 Rosetta support, along with the latest D3DMetal 2, allows many newer games (Black Myth Wukong etc) to run on Apple Silicon if you’re so inclined. The Apple Gaming Wiki website lists various methods, or see Andrew Tsai’s Youtube channel for easy to follow guides. Though, personally, I only use the Apple Silicon port of MAME. Works well

[pekbro]

Re Gaming.. Sequoia's AVX2 Rosetta support, along with the latest D3DMetal 2, allows many newer games (Black Myth Wukong etc) to run on Apple Silicon if you’re so inclined. The Apple Gaming Wiki website lists various methods, or see Andrew Tsai’s Youtube channel for easy to follow guides. Though, personally, I only use the Apple Silicon port of MAME. Works well

Thanks, its been a while since I looked into the mac gaming thing, I'll check it out. Dunno if they'll work, but I still have a number of game lics for mac from when I last made a hackintosh some years ago.

[4damind]

That's the only thing I miss under MacOS... a kind of WSL like on Windows I used that for a long time for development with Nginx and it worked really well.
However, UTM (frontend for QEMU) runs pretty well and with it you can also run a complete Linux e.g. Debian for free or just Vmware Fusion Pro which is now free for private use...

What's wrong with macOS with homebrew or Macports as a Unix?

There is something similar under Windows with Cygwin. I like a complete runtime environment with Linux more and also my Debian package system

[bulevardi]

The article from ArsTechnica says:...

I thought I read it wrongly... but ArseTechnica... really?
They decided to name their news company like this by purpose?

[Synthman2000]

A thread where insecurities are laid bare.

I use silent audio specific built PC's because I like the price (about 1/3 to 1/2 of an Apple equivalent machine) I know where I am with PC's, hardware and OS and I like that you can do so much for a very reasonable cost. OS workflow familiar and efficient are important factors.

I have built many PC's in the past so understand enough about the hardware and OS for audio to make them work well which can also help when things go wrong. Which is rare if you have the best components that exist for your PC.

I would like a mac learn it and be happy as well.

I stick with what I know and I am very happy with it. If you want to spend more on an Apple that does the same fine, and if not also fine.

We are broadly, within a few degrees comparing 2 things that do exactly the same job.

"Speed" cpu/chipsets/memory and HDD's is probably the last thing to worry about in 2024.

There is no need to feel lesser because you use 1 of the 2 opposing options as they are the same.

More important is to remember not to waste your life.

[NER]

You can build a quiet 14900k or 9950x based PC DAW.
Any hyperbolic YouTube video that says otherwise is absolutely FOS.
I've been building PC DAWs professionally for 30+ years.

I've got the new $4000 Mac Studio here (to support clients).
Is it as fast (or as flexible) as a 14900k or 9950x custom build? No.

I mean it is true that the 14900k pulls massive amounts of power even stock, and if you overclock it, it can pull 400+ W.

But you can reduce that a lot with a small hit to performance by tweaking certain BIOS settings (like reducing PL1/PL2) and undervolting, and tweaking fan curves.