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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

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1080 points antipaul | 10 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.117s | source | bottom
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cactus2093 ◴[12 Nov 20 03:07 UTC] No.25065963[source]▶
This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end.

Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud.

And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards.

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1. alasdair_ ◴[12 Nov 20 03:41 UTC] No.25066164[source]▶
I’ll take a stab at the problem: an “actual professional” in this context is someone who makes their money by using the computer.
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2. stu2b50 ◴[12 Nov 20 03:48 UTC] No.25066202[source]▶
That does include practically every white collar occupation at this point.
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3. throwaheyy ◴[12 Nov 20 03:58 UTC] No.25066276[source]▶
I’d extend it to mean someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient (for example, they are using dev tools or video editing as opposed to Excel, Word and email).
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4. stu2b50 ◴[12 Nov 20 04:03 UTC] No.25066305{3}[source]▶
That would exclude many programming positions, though, since really the old Air is perfectly fine for most SWE positions. Not optimal, but you can run iterm2, you can run a web browser, and you can run vim.
5. Nition ◴[12 Nov 20 04:03 UTC] No.25066307[source]▶
It seems like a reasonable definition to me as long as it's clear that "the computer" means that specific computer.

e.g. In this definition, if you use a PC at your office and a laptop at home for non-work stuff, your work PC is being used by a "professional" and your home laptop isn't.

6. numpad0 ◴[12 Nov 20 04:08 UTC] No.25066337[source]▶
I’ve seen a screenshot of someone in consultancy roles, an obvious professional by dictionary definition, trash talking hard and mean on some software developers for demanding computers that can build software, that however has no tangible merit in their eyes, like PowerPoint or Excel performances. There might be something interesting in divisions across different types of “Pro”.
7. numpad0 ◴[12 Nov 20 04:13 UTC] No.25066364{3}[source]▶
I don’t think it’s necessarily good that people say Word or Excel is non-Pro tasks fit for cheap and “lite” computers.
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8. throwaheyy ◴[12 Nov 20 04:31 UTC] No.25066468{4}[source]▶
It’s a generalization, of course there are exceptions
9. JumpCrisscross ◴[12 Nov 20 04:45 UTC] No.25066542{3}[source]▶
> someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient

Given how powered up the Air has become, this is a thin envelope.

10. cactus2093 ◴[12 Nov 20 05:14 UTC] No.25066709[source]▶
See, I think that is very far from the definition a lot of others have in mind. By your definition, probably 95% of professionals don't need any more power than a macbook air.