My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.
I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.
The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.
The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”
I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.
Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!
To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.
Cheers, Stephen
An Airbook sets me back €1000, enough to buy a used car, and AFAICT is much more difficult to get fully working Linux on than my €200 amd64 build.
Why hasn't apple caught up?
Precisely because of that they haven't caught up. They don't want to compete in the PC race to them bottom that nearly bankrupted them in the 90s before they invented the iPod.
Apple got rich by creating its own markets.
And he was right. Netbooks mostly sucked. Same with Chromebooks.
There’s nothing to be gained by racing to the bottom.
You can buy an m1 laptop for $599 at Walmart. That’s an amazing deal.
pcpartpicker link?
An AMD APU paired with a microATX motherboard is the cheapest way to get reasonable computing performance. The best thing I ever did was to buy only a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. For €90, I was blown away.
See if you can salvage any parts, there's no need for a case, SSD, and PSU every time. AMD has a nice upgrade path for this. A motherboard with AM2+ socket will fit an AM3 CPU. You can then later upgrade to an AM3+ motherboard and wait for a reasonably priced AM4 CPU, and so on. My gripe with this, however, is that it used to be possible to have different (scavenged) DDR RAM parts as long as it was the same number of pins. A quick glance at the notches would tell you if it fits and that was that. Nowadays you often have to have either just one bank or a few of exactly the same part.
Sometimes it's possible to get lucky, like buying a cheaper model CPU and succesfully unlocking an extra core. And a boxed CPU may be more expensive than a loose tray, but comes with an adequate cooler that'll fit just fine.
Neither of us have any contact details in the profile, although I'm not sure if I can be of much help to you anyway.
One more tip. If you see your box increasingly use swap during normal workload, adding RAM can significantly improve performance. Even if it's lower spec RAM.