Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up upgrade RAM / SSD / even mobo is worth some tradeoff to me, where my employers will just throw my MBP away in a few years).

Curious if the suspend / hibernate "just works" when you close the lid?

I feel like I've tried several times to get this working in both Linux and Windows on various laptops and have never actually found a reliable solution (often resulting in having a hot and dead laptop in my backpack).

I learned that even tho I run Ubuntu, arch wiki has good info on proper commands to run to configure this behavior on my machine.

I’m sure it’s great.

As a layman there’s no way I’m running something called “Pop!_OS” versus Mac OS.

I have an intel framework running fedora. I have found that intels s0 sleep just uses way too much battery. I’d expect that in sleep mode, it should last a week and still be above 50% power but that is definitely not the case.

I ended up moving to hybrid, where it suspends for an hour allowing immediate wake up then hibernates completely. It’s a decent compromise and I’ve never once had an issue with resume from suspend or hibernate, nor have I ever had an issue with it randomly waking up and frying itself in a backpack or unexpectedly having a dead battery.

My work M1 is still superior in this regard but it is an acceptable compromise.

How'd you get here - "as a layman"?

It does! The only thing wasn't working out of the box, so to speak, was the fingerprint reader, I had to do a little config to get it going.

Meh, it's kind of a silly name, sure, but it's one of the few distros backed by an actual vendor (System76) who isn't just trying to sucker you into buying something. As a result it has a nice level of polish and function.

I like macOS fine, I have been using Macs since 1984 (though things like SIP grate).

You're missing out. I've daily-driven both, modern macOS feels like a Fischer Price operating system by comparison.

5 hours seems a lot worse than the ~10 hours I get on my M4 Air.

I get like 3 hours on my MBP when I use it. MacBooks have better runtime only when they are mostly idle, not when you fully load them.

Can confirm, when developing software (a big project at $JOB) getting 3h out of a M3 MBP is a good day. IDE, build, test and crowdstrike are all quite power hungry.

At a certain point it's not like it matters. If you're working for 5 hours, let alone 10, you will almost certainly be able to plug in during that time.

I concur.

The only portable M device I heavily used on the go was my iPad Pro.

That thing could survive for over a week if not or lightly used. But as soon as you open Lightroom to process photos, the battery would melt away in an hour or two.

> "[...] battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so [...]"

You call five hours good?! Damn... For productivity use, I'd never buy anything below shift-endurance (eight hours or more).

It’s true for me. I need a portable workstation more than a mobile laptop, as long as it survives train travels (most have power outlets now), moving between buildings/rooms or the occasional meeting with a customer +presentation it is enough for me.

But I can imagine some people have different needs and may not have access to (enough) power outlets. Some meeting/conference rooms had only a handful outlets for dozens of people. Definitely nice to survive light office work for a full working day.

Depends on what you do at work, 5 hours of continuous editing video is pretty good.

I wonder how much of that is crowdstrike. At $LASTJOB my Mac was constantly chugging due to some mandated security software. Battery life on that computer was always horrible compared to a personal MB w/o it.

> crowdstrike

It is incredible that crowdstrike is still operating as a business.

It is also hard to understand why companies continue to deploy shoddy, malware-like "security" software that decreases reliability while increasing the attack surface.

Basically you need another laptop just to run the "security" software.

Exactly. Antiviruses are evil in this sense - crippling battery life significantly.

Wherever possible, I send “pkill -STOP” to all those processes, and stall them and thus save battery…

Allegedly, crowdstrike is S-tier EDR. Can’t blame security folks to want to have it. The performance and battery tax is very real though.

Ever since Crowdstrike fucked up and took out $10 billion worth of Windows PCs with a bad patch, most of the security folks I know have come around to the view that it is an overall liability. Something lighter-touch carries less risk, even if it isn't quite as effective.

there's a few different reasons: - its pushed by gov (it gives full access to machines, huge backdoor) - its not actually the worst of its kind, sadly - their threat database is good (ie it will catch stuff) - it lets you look at everything on the machine (not the only one, but, its def. useful) - its big - cant be faulted for "we had it and we got pwned" - yep, sad as well

If operating systems weren't as poop as they are today, this would not be necessary - but here we are. And I bet you major OS manufacturers will not really fix their OSes without ensuring its just a fully walled garden (terrible for devs.. but you'll probably just run a linux vm for dev on top..). Bad intents lead to bad software.

The firewall on that computer killed the battery (with repeated crashing). It also refused to work with a USB Ethernet adapter so I could only use wifi. It was clearly a product meant to check a security box, written by a company that knew nothing about Macs, bought by Enterprise Windows admins. It was incredibly frustrating. (The next version of MacOS moved firewalls away from in-kernel to extensions. I like to think it was my repeated crash logs that made the difference.)

I half wonder if that’s part of the issue with Windows PCs and their battery life. The OS requires so much extra monitoring just to protect itself that it ends up affecting performance and battery life significantly. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if this alone was the major performance boost Macs have over Windows laptops.

Highly dependent on workload, using my older work laptop with 100Wh battery it lasted maybe ~40min if you put some real work on it. Browsing the web or managing tickets on Jira is completely different

I get 8 to 10 hours of light use on my personal ThinkPad. Or ~6 h of Netflix at 50% screen brightness, despite the lack of hardware decoding for DRM encrypted video on Linux. All of these are with a max charge threshold of 80%. 5 hours of battery life sounds rather limited to me, too.

But then the numbers are hardly comparable without having comparable workloads. If I were regularly running builds or had some other moderate load throughout a working day, that'd probably cost a couple of hours.

If it makes you feel better, my work provided MBP has picked up this habit and is dead take the time i go to wake it up

Windows laptops are still worse, but i appreciate Apple continuing to give me reasons to hate them

Why does SIP grate? For my work machines I really want features like SIP to prevent fuckups and malware (especially considering how much code a random rust or node application pulls in).

For tinkering machines and servers and stuff of course that’s a different story..

You can always disable it on your tinkering machines.