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

A lot of insightful comments already, but there are two other tricks I think Apple is using: (1) the laptops can get really hot before the fans turn on audibly and (2) the fans are engineered to be super quiet. So even if they run on low RPM, you won't hear them. This makes the M-series seem even more efficient than they are.

Also, especially the MacBook Pros have really large batteries, on average larger than the competition. This increases the battery runtime.

The macbook air doesn't even have a fan. I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.

You can, the thing is you have to build it out of a solid piece of metal. Either that's patented by Apple or it is too expensive for x86 system builders.

Sure you can. There are a bunch listed in this article: https://www.ultrabookreview.com/6520-fanless-ultrabooks/

Fanless x86 desktops are a thing too, in the form of thin clients and small PCs intended for business use. I have a few HP T630s I use as servers (I have used them as desktop PCs too, but my tab-hoarding habit makes them throttle a bit too much for my use - they'd be fine for a lot of people).

If I recall correctly Apple had to buy enormous numbers of CNC machines in order to build laptops that way. It was considered insane by the industry at the time.

> I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.

Sure you can, they’re readily available on the market, though not especially common.

But even performance laptops can often be run without spinning their fans up at all. Right now, the ambient temperature where I live is around 28°, and my four-year-old Ryzen 5800HS laptop hasn’t used its fan all day, though for a lot of that time it will have been helped by a ceiling fan. But even away from a fan for the last half hour, it sits in my lap only warm, not hot. It’s easy enough to give it a load it’ll need to spin the fan up for, but you can also limit it so it will never need its fan. (In summer when the ambient temperature is 10°C higher every day, you’ll want to use its fan even when idling, and it’ll be hard to convince it not to spin them up.)

x86-64 devices that are don’t even have fans won’t ever have such powerful CPUs, and historically have always been very underpowered. Like only 60% of my 5800HS’s single-threaded benchmarking and only 20% of its multithreaded. But at under 20% of the peak power consumption.

Sure, I have one sitting on my desk right now. It uses an Intel Core m3, and it's 7.5 years old, so it can't exactly be described as high performance, but it has a fantastic 3200x1800 screen and 8GB of RAM, and since I do all my number-crunching on remote servers it has been absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, the 7.5-year-old battery no longer lasts the whole day (it'll do more like 2 hours, or 1 hour running Zoom/Teams). It has a nice rigid all-metal construction and no fan. I'm looking around for a replacement but not finding much that makes sense.

Now it makes complete sense. Sort of like how crowbarring a computer into a laptop form factor was considered insane back in the early 90s.

Yup. The original article is gone, however there is the key excerpt in an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532257

Apple, unlike a lot, if not all large companies (who are run by MBA beancounter morons), holds insanely large amounts of cash. That is how they can go and buy up entire markets of vendors - CNC mills, TSMC's entire production capacity for a year or two, specialized drills, god knows what else.

They effectively price out all potential competitors at once for years at a time. Even if Microsoft or Samsung would want to compete with Apple and make their own full aluminium cases, LED microdots or whatever - they could not because Apple bought exclusivity rights to the machines necessary.

Of course, there's nothing stopping Microsoft or Samsung to do the same in theory... the problem these companies have is that building the war chest necessary would drag down their stonk price way too much.

Do you have a version of that web page for people who want to run Linux? That'd be particularly helpful.

its x86, they all run linux. x86 (as in amd64) is standardized

There certainly have been issues with drivers. It'd be nice to know in advance if that's the case with any particular system.

Some of the other big tech companies have or are able to have just as much, if not more cash, than Apple:

https://www.capitaladvisors.com/research/war-chest-exploring...

They just don’t want to bet they can deploy it successfully in the hardware market to compete with Apple, so they focus on other things (cloud services, ads, media, etc).

I've been experimenting with Asahi Linux recently on a spare M2 Air I have lying around, honestly very impressed. It's come on a lot since I last tried it a year or so ago

For those like me who wanted to hunt down the linkrotted article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201108182313/http://atomicdeli...

My experience with fanless Intel is that they tend to be rather sluggish for desktop GUI use, though. Which doesn't seem to be an issue with Macbook Air.

Google is not a hardware company (outside of the Pixel lineup where they just take some white-label ODM design).

Microsoft has a bit more hardware sales exposure from its consoles, but not for PCs. They don't have a need for revolutionary "it looks cool" stuff that Apple has.

Amazon, same thing. They brand their own products as the cheap baseline, again no need.

And Meta, all they do is VR stuff. And they did invest(ed?) tons of money into that.

The point is they have enough cash to make an attempt to be whatever company they want. Apple chose to delve into hardware, the others chose not to, not because they don’t have the cash.

It can consume almost 20W sustained, which is quite a lot. Competitors will definitely have fans roaring at this power draw. I think the all metal design makes a huge difference from a cooling perspective. The entire case is basically a heatsink.