[HN Gopher] Boring Is What We Wanted
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Boring Is What We Wanted
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-10-28 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (512pixels.net)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| M1 had performance/watt way ahead of x86.
|
| M5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake.
|
| Is that really what you want?
| mcphage wrote:
| No, you're right, that's not--let me go buy a Panther Lake
| laptop right now. What site would you recommend?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| M5 and Panther Lake are both late 2025 releases. They're fair
| comparisons.
| doomroot13 wrote:
| Panther Lake isn't appearing in any products until 2026.
| hinkley wrote:
| That's partly the difference between making your own
| components and getting them from a vendor. Sure Intel can
| send select vendors prerelease prototypes but the
| feedback loop will never be as efficient as in house.
|
| But it's like a margin call. Everything is great until it
| completely sucks. Of course a lot of that comes down to
| TSMC. So if Apple falls it's likely others will too.
| mdasen wrote:
| I think it's the difference between having enough CPUs
| that you can launch a product and having enough CPUs that
| people start planning future products.
|
| Volume takes time. That's why we're seeing 2026. And
| before someone says "that just gives Apple an advantage
| because they're smaller," Apple is shipping a comparable
| volume of CPUs - and they're doing basically all their
| volume on the latest fabrication tech.
| tom_ wrote:
| You're absolutely right. Where should we go to get a
| Panther Lake laptop?
| supportengineer wrote:
| I don't want Panther Lake, whatever that is.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
| Spivak wrote:
| This is just how Intel names their CPU generations. It's far
| more boring than you're imagining. It's presumably named
| after https://snohomishcountywa.gov/5383/Panther
|
| Comet Lake, Elkhart Lake, Cooper Lake, Rocket Lake, Adler
| Lake, Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Yes, I really want an M5, a CPU I can buy today, more than
| Panther Lake, which isn't on the market yet and hasn't been
| reviewed by 3rd parties.
|
| I want a laptop that gives me amazing performance, thermals,
| build quality, and battery life. It's gonna take a while to see
| what manufacturers will do with panther lake.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| These arguments constantly devolve into "why would you want
| an APPLE product that's less good than $_new_shiny_PC_thing"
| and it's always currently available products being pitched
| against conceptual products in the heads of Intel's fanboys
| that may come to market in a year. It's a ridiculous
| comparison.
|
| I got an M3 Pro Macbook Pro on clearance recently for $1,600,
| 16 inch screen brighter than any PC laptop's I've ever seen,
| that's the fastest computer I have ever used, hands down and
| it's 2 generations out of date already. OR I can have a PC
| gaming laptop where the fit and finish isn't as nice, where
| the screen is blurrier, the battery life maxes out at 4 hours
| if I do absolutely nothing with it, and any time I do
| anything of remote consequence the fans kick up and make it
| sound like it's trying to take off.
|
| And that's without even taking into account the awful mess
| Windows is lately, especially around power management. It
| makes every laptop experience frustrating, with the same
| issues that were there when I was in fucking high school.
|
| Like if you just hate Mac, fine, obviously a Mac is a bad fit
| for you then and I wouldn't try and tell you otherwise. But I
| absolutely reserve the right to giggle when those same people
| are turning their logical brains into pretzels to justify
| hating a Mac when it has utterly left the PC behind in all
| things apart from gaming.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| And even for gaming, depending on what you play it's
| perfectly serviceable.
| hinkley wrote:
| When the Thunderbolt Display came out I was in a raid group
| and I wanted a display with great refresh rate and low
| delay (melee character, don't get stuck standing in the
| poo). So I researched and researched and the only monitor
| that had equivalent response times to that dumb Thunderbolt
| Display was only $60 cheaper, had a plastic shell and I'd
| have to fight UPS over getting it.
|
| Or I could drive across town and have a monitor today and
| pay $60 for the aluminum shell that hides dust better.
| wpm wrote:
| I have a PC on the other side of my wall from where I'm
| sitting with a 7800X3D and an nvidia 4090. It's for gaming
| only most of the time, though I do take advantage of the
| 4090 for some basic LLM stuff, mostly for local audio
| transcription and summarizing (I take a lot of notes out
| loud, I speak faster than I can write). The rest of the
| time it's playing AAA gaming titles at full tilt at
| 5120x1440, full res, getting 60fps on basically anything I
| throw at it, all while sucking down 600W (400 for the GPU
| alone while playing Cyberpunk). It's a beast. I love it.
|
| I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls
| 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It
| cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's
| _including_ an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.
|
| Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound;
| the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years
| after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another
| internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better,
| but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a
| full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it
| (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's
| huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the
| weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of
| amps coursing through them.
|
| Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the
| monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same
| tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less
| power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is
| for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not
| getting the M4 Pro.
| mdasen wrote:
| Yea, this is how I feel too. I've been hoping that Intel
| would turn itself around, but Intel has failed at its
| roadmap over the past few years. Intel canceled 20A and 18A
| is delayed. It had looked like Intel would leapfrog TSMC,
| but that didn't come to fruition.
|
| I hope that Intel does well in the future. It's better for
| us all if more than one company can push the boundaries on
| fabrication.
|
| I also remember the days when the shoe was on the other
| foot. Motorola or IBM was going to put out a processor that
| would decimate Intel - it was always a year away.
| Meanwhile, Intel kept pushing the P6 architecture (Pentium
| Pro to Pentium 3) and then NetBurst (Pentium 4) and then
| Core. Apple keeps improving its M-series processors and
| single-core speed is up 80% since the M1 and 25% faster
| than the fastest desktop processor from AMD and 31% faster
| than the fastest desktop processor from Intel.
|
| I'd love for Panther Lake to be amazing. It will put
| pressure on Apple to offer better performance for my
| dollar. Some of performance is how much CPU a company is
| willing to give me at a price point and what margins
| they'll accept. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to
| offer more cores at a cheaper price, that's a win for Apple
| users. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer 2nm
| processors quicker (at higher cost to them), that's a win
| for Apple users.
|
| But I'm also skeptical of Intel. They kept promising 10nm
| for years and failed. They've done a bit better lately, but
| they've also stumbled a lot and they're way behind their
| roadmap. What kind of volume will we see for Panther Lake?
| What prices? It's hard to compare a hopeful product to
| something that actually exists today. Part of it isn't just
| whether Intel can make 18A chips, but how fast can they
| produce them. If most of Intel's laptop, desktop, and
| server processors in 2026 aren't 18A, then it isn't the
| same win. And before someone says "Apple is just a niche
| manufacturer," they aren't anymore. Apple is making CPUs
| for every iPhone in addition to Macs so it has to be able
| to get CPUs manufactured at a very high scale - around the
| same scale as the Intel's CPU market.
|
| I hope Intel can do wonderfully, but given how much Intel
| has overpromised and underdelivered, I'm definitely not
| taking their word for it.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Leaving aside the availability of various Intel processors,
| _exactly_ what I want is for the various manufacturers to
| compete as hard as they possibly can.
|
| I want Intel to catch up this month. And then next month I want
| AMD to overtake them. And then ARM to make them all look slow.
| And then Apple to show them how it's done.
|
| The absolute last thing I'd want is for Apple to have special
| magic chips that nobody else even comes close to.
| doomroot13 wrote:
| I am excited about Panther Lake myself but where are you
| reading that it has higher performance/watt than M5? The chips
| aren't even out yet. All we have are Intel marketing materials
| with vague lines on charts. No one could have possibly done a
| performance/watt test on Panther Lake yet. I'm hoping they beat
| M5 but if I had to, I'd put my money on M5.
| BirAdam wrote:
| From what I've read, single thread for panther lake is roughly
| the same as last gen. The gains are in efficiency, multi
| thread, and GPU. The most optimistic reading I've seen
| suggested 50% gains in GPU performance and in multithread. I'll
| wait for independent testing before making any judgements, but
| Intel has a way to go to rebuild trust.
| bigyabai wrote:
| We want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers,
| I _thought_ it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution
| that wasn 't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later
| with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and
| has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade
| alone.
|
| If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you.
| It's not boring _enough_ for me.
| tel wrote:
| Genuine question, how does SPIR-V compare with CUDA? Why is
| SPIR-V in a trench coat less desirable? What is it about Metal
| that makes it SPIR-V in a trench coat (assuming that's what you
| meant)?
| XorNot wrote:
| At this stage of the game what people want is CUDA. I just
| bought a new GPU and the only requirement I had was "must run
| reasonably mondern CUDA".
| p-o wrote:
| There might be a subset of people, such as yourself, that
| looks for CUDA as a hard requirements when buying a GPU.
| But I think it's fair to say that Vulkan/Spir-V has a _lot_
| of investment and momentum currently outside of the US AI
| bubble.
|
| Valve is spending a lot of resources and AFAIK so are all
| the AI companies in the asian market.
|
| There are plenty of people who wants an open-source
| alternative that breaks the monopoly that Nvidia has over
| CUDA.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think the new AMD R9700 looks pretty exciting for the
| price. Basically a power tweaked RX 9070 with 32gb vram
| and pro drivers. Wish it was an option 6-7 months ago
| when I put my new desktop together.
| davedx wrote:
| Not me: I wanted Apple's software division to innovate like its
| hardware division. Extra power with nothing to use it on except
| more and more docker containers isn't compelling to me. I've not
| upgraded my M1 Macbook Pro and don't plan to
| Herring wrote:
| Honestly I'd be happy if they just made it stop lagging when I
| switch between multiple desktops in mission control. I spend
| most of my time in 3d party apps anyway. They recently added
| that lag I think with the liquid glass.
| tonypapousek wrote:
| I think Final Cut and maybe Logic make good use of the new
| silicon features.
|
| I'm rather happy I don't have to upgrade from my M1. More
| performance is nice, but making it the baseline to run an OS
| would just be silly.
| didibus wrote:
| How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point? You
| can install applications and they can innovate.
|
| Maybe you need AI, but maybe you just need some AI agent app
| that uses AppleScript under the hood.
|
| I'd rather buttery smooth, secure, fast, no bugs, let me do my
| work.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I don't think anyone should upgrade if they're happy, but I
| also think faster chips do have real-world benefits that tend
| not to be appreciated by people who aren't valuing their time
| enough. I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4 earlier this year, and
| it's had a couple real-world benefits:
|
| - builds are noticeably faster on later chips as multicore
| performance has increased a lot. When I replaced my M1 MBP with
| an M4, builds in both Xcode, cargo and LaTeX (I'll switch to
| Typst one of these days, but haven't yet) took about 60% of the
| time they had previously. That adds up to real productivity
| gains
|
| - when running e.g. qwen3 on LM Studio, I was getting 3-5 tok/s
| on the M1 and 10-15 on the M4, which to me at least crosses the
| fuzzy barrier between "interesting toy to tinker with
| sometimes" and "can actually use for real work"
| al_borland wrote:
| I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a
| CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn't a
| thrilling update, it's important that they do these regularly so
| consumers looking to buy aren't forced to buy a 3 year old
| product with no idea when a refresh will come. I've been in this
| situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating.
| I'm glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule.
|
| I think the issue stems from too many people making their living
| off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When
| updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more
| boring article/video. I always worry that these types of
| responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old
| chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so
| there is something new to talk about.
| ebbi wrote:
| Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining
| that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember
| the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update
| schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's
| limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it
| looks the same.
|
| I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and
| retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to
| this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some
| people want more frequent design changes!
| bittercynic wrote:
| They say no downside, but if you need to run windows 7 in
| virtualbox, you still need an intel mac (or other non-arm
| computer).
| pavlov wrote:
| Windows 7 is sixteen years old. There are full x86 emulators
| available. Seems like a niche pursuit.
| bittercynic wrote:
| I have an old card printer that I only use occasionally, and
| firing up a windows 7 virtual machine is (was?) the most
| convenient way to do it. I think it's not so uncommon to have
| old devices around that don't work with newer versions of
| windows.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| I don't think that use case is worth designing a computer
| for in 2025
| vardump wrote:
| Perhaps a Macbook is now fast enough to just run Windows 7
| in full emulation? Haven't tried, though.
|
| Edit: Checked on Youtube. Yeah, Windows 7 seems fast enough
| on an Apple silicon Macbook in full emulated mode. For
| example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I have an old 2019 MBP running Windows 10 for old gaming
| tiagod wrote:
| Today I was testing an x64 msi installer and app in a Windows
| ARM VM on UTM and it worked just fine with the Windows built-in
| emulation.
| kentm wrote:
| Frankly I'd be incredibly exited if the next Apple OS update was
| "No new major featurs. Bug fixes, perf optimization, and minor
| ergonomic improvements only".
| pavlov wrote:
| The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard approach. It was good.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Sadly this approach is less likely to get the exec a bonus
| fullofdev wrote:
| Agree! very happy with the M4 performance.
| amelius wrote:
| General purpose computing is what we wanted.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| I've heard that the M-series chips with metal do great on the
| whole small model with low latency front; but I have no practical
| experience doing this yet. I'm hoping to add some local LLM/STT
| function to my office without heating my house.
|
| I'm uncertain as to whether a M1/M2 mac mini will be performant
| enough, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5
| architecture that make it worth my while.
|
| Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model
| performance and latency space, or are they just as small or
| smaller?
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