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
My Apple friends get 12+ hrs of battery life. I really wish Lenovo+Fedora or whoever would get together and make that possible.
I'm a Linux guy too, when I have to use a Mac I turn all the gloss off and it's ok, but without going to Nix I miss a system wide package manager and I like an open-as-possible community OS that runs everywhere. It's a shame Apple doesn't license their chips.
About a year ago I got a maxed out Macbook Pro, but the above combined with the fact I wasn't comfortable travelling with something that cost as much as a good used car made me return it.
Now I'm using a Thinkpad that was ¼ the price and it's great, AMD chip, 64GB of RAM, replaceable storage, fantastic screen, keyboard (and Trackpoint) means it can do just about anything. Yes, battery life is limited, around four hours with the 16" OLED (I haven't put any work into optimizing it, and this isn't a battery-first model), but I can handle it. I'll maybe get a Strix Halo laptop since I like running LLMs, but otherwise x86 has improved enough that it's pretty good. That said, I won't complain if it matches/surpasses Apple chips, and I'd consider running a headless Apple 'server' at home.