I do not see Apple going back to Intel either. Apple certainly benefits from economies of scale, but in the sense that producing iPhone's processors make it feasible to make processors for the Mac as well (but not the other way round). It could only happen if Intel overperformed in a way to leave Apple's M-series in the dust, and for a consistent period of time, which is very unlikely to happen.
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The worst time to buy a Windows computer? (2022 death of x86?)
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Prices are preinflated so less demand doesn't help. There's also the issue of paying more for lower fps.
I don't need a lot of FPS - moreso multiple monitor support and performance per watt.
I just have a GTX 1050 ti - my goals were to support four monitors, 3 at 4k, and to use a minimal amount of power running my programs. I'm quite happy that I snagged it before the supply problems hit. I really do wish that the M1 mini had supported 3 4k monitors and 32 GB of RAM.
I don't need crazy fps either so minimum 60fps but preferably at least 90fps for competitive first-person shooter. 20fps is unplayable on my MBA M1 while costing about the same as the Lenovo Legion Slim with 3060 that performs better at 70W than $3k+ M1 Max. Saving grace is gaming laptops if you don't luck out on Best Buy Nvidia FE, AMD or EVGA drops.
The only game I play is chess and I thing that one or two SPF would be good enough.
If you like Windows I would highly recommend a AMD based cpu. X86 is not going anywhere for a while.
That being said M1 macs are really a paradigm shift. If you don't need pro requirements the new air with M2 should last a long while. Apple silicon is the future for Macs and it is going to be here for a long while. I suspect longer than Intel or PPC but we are all guessing.
I really do think if you buy an Intel system in 4 or 5 years you might regret it while the M1 Macs and beyond are ahead of their time now and should age well but I would wait for the redesign of the air or get the new MBP 14 or 16"! The older Macs including M1 based laptops and all Intel models will not age well due to the thicker bezels.
Good luck whatever you decide!
That being said M1 macs are really a paradigm shift. If you don't need pro requirements the new air with M2 should last a long while. Apple silicon is the future for Macs and it is going to be here for a long while. I suspect longer than Intel or PPC but we are all guessing.
I really do think if you buy an Intel system in 4 or 5 years you might regret it while the M1 Macs and beyond are ahead of their time now and should age well but I would wait for the redesign of the air or get the new MBP 14 or 16"! The older Macs including M1 based laptops and all Intel models will not age well due to the thicker bezels.
Good luck whatever you decide!
Same here, which is why I was hesitant to pull the trigger on the XPS 9510 I have now. But I went ahead and gave it a shot, and the thing came out of the box flawless, and has been so the first month I've owned it. Granted, a month is barely a tick of the clock, but I have high hopes...
I had a bad experience with a XPS 9550 that I bought a few years ago. But the XPS line probably evolved a lot since then, and my particular model was defective.
Everything has been rock solid to this point, including things that were trouble in the past, like the trackpads. The only negative I have with it so far, that is shared by many other laptops, is the camera is, uh...unimpressive.
It depends on the expectations.
If you buy a computer to last for 4-5 years, then Intel should be fine, even though it may be overshadowed by someone else in a short period of time. Any processor will eventually get old some day.
If your expectations are to keep the computer for something close to 10 years, then think again. Intel processors will be supported, but I am not sure which direction they are taking.
They've been waiting for Apple. Now they have the green light to go 1080.
It hasn't. I got a top end Precision 5550 from work. It is derived from the same platform I think. It cost £3100. Problems:
1. When you pick it up the touchpad clicks
2. The screen has built in vignette like a 1930s camera.
3. It sounds like a Concorde taking off.
4. It overheats at least twice a day, triggers a "CPU thermal event" and goes into hibernate
5. If I plug it into the dell dock it crashes one in every 3-4 times completely hosing what you're doing.
6. The keyboard is like typing on stepping stones from Takeshi's Castle.
7. They keyboard has all the wrong keys the wrong places.
8. It has three USB-C holes and only one of them still works.
9. When it arrived the packaging was so badly designed it was almost impossible to get it out of the plastic crate that was nestling inside the large lump of cardboard designed by someone fresh out of university in China.
10. It overheats after exactly 3 minutes every time you switch the Nvidia RTX on.
11. The battery lasts about 2 hours if you're lucky.
12. Sometimes when you shut it down or hibernate it doesn't actually shut down and turns the battery contents into heat over the following hour or so leaving you with a brick when you get it out later.
13. It takes twice as long to compute anything CPU intensive as my ass end M1 MBA which doesn't suffer any of those problems and cost less than 1/3 of that.
It's garbage. I hate it. On a positive note they ordered me a 16" MBP after complaining for the last month.
I would be seriously pissed if I'd paid for it out of my own pocket.
The worst time to buy any windows computer is right upon us. I've been using windows on and off professionally since about 1992 and it's just absolutely horrible soul crushing waste of my life and money at this point. I want nothing to do with the platform any longer. I haven't even written up a rant about windows itself yet.
The only killer niche in the PC space at this point is providing mid to high end desktop workstations which are too damn expensive from Apple.
You mean Apple got the green light from Microsoft Surface which has industry leading webcam like on the Surface Pro X. Webcam quality on Surface at 1080p still looks better than Apple 1080p. Regardless, glad industry is moving away from dog poo 720p webcam.
Please do. Seriously. I found your post about the Dell interesting and mirroring some of the experience I've had with Windows laptops. As a result, I'd like to hear your opinion/rant on Windows itself and why you feel that way.
I'm currently in something of a no man's land, trying to decide between which platform to stick with in the long term. While I have a powerful Ryzen 7 Windows PC, I also have a MacBook Air M1. Both have their pros and cons, but the integration with other hardware (iPhone, iPad etc) on the Apple side is superb.
I also own a Surface Book which I am close to selling. I've always loved the versatility and different form factors of Windows hardware but I'm finding Windows 11 in particular is letting it down – and I actually enjoy using the MacBook Air, even without touchscreen or pen/tablet functionality, more than I thought I would.
Five weeks into Dell XPS 9510 ownership, and everything remains solid. It came out of the box flawless, which surprised me given the horror stories I've heard. Windows 11 has been okay for me so far, but getting rid of all the crap the system/Edge was burdened with was a chore, one that any non-tech enthusiast would struggle with. Only one glitch so far, when the system apparently tried to do an update and virus scan at the same time, it hung up and needed a recovery reboot, which fixed it with no further issues.
Having said that, let me add this: I don't do any strenuous or mission critical work on this, a base model 15" with 6-core i5, 8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. Blogging/writing, light photo editing (jpegs), YouTube, and news. For those who need the power, who are buying this system with a discrete graphics card, i9, etc., I can imagine that fan noise, throttling and more would come into play. It seems to me that this design might simply be too thin to be a serious desktop replacement workstation without generating some issues for the end user.
I'm enjoying the device, to be honest, but if Apple ever decides to create the unicorn 15/16" MBA or similar for the non-pro user, I'd probably jump back in a heartbeat.
Having said that, let me add this: I don't do any strenuous or mission critical work on this, a base model 15" with 6-core i5, 8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. Blogging/writing, light photo editing (jpegs), YouTube, and news. For those who need the power, who are buying this system with a discrete graphics card, i9, etc., I can imagine that fan noise, throttling and more would come into play. It seems to me that this design might simply be too thin to be a serious desktop replacement workstation without generating some issues for the end user.
I'm enjoying the device, to be honest, but if Apple ever decides to create the unicorn 15/16" MBA or similar for the non-pro user, I'd probably jump back in a heartbeat.
It probably won't be the death of x86 this year, too much momentum and nobody who hasn't already wants to abandon Windows, but god I wish it were. I think a future where ARM, POWER, RISC-V, and I guess MIPS via China all have significant market share is the best future because it prevents monoculture. Even just having ARM around kickstarted Intel to try to get more energy efficient, imagine having two and a half more archs on top of that.
I've been shopping iMacs from 2013 to 2019 and it is really amazing how slow CPU performance gains from Intel were through that period. The gains that I see in 2019 and 2020 were due to AMD pushing them with more cores. The single-core gains in 2021 were from Apple and AMD pushing them. I much prefer running Apple Silicon on mobile but I'm still fine with older and slower Intel CPUs on the desktop and that's because of battery life and thermals. I would prefer efficiency on the desktop as well but prices are coming down on older stuff and it's good enough and I can easily put in 32 GB or more of RAM.
To be honest, CPU gains are slow because for the vast majority of people, computers are more than powerful enough. Even for gamers, the most common gaming processor is along the lines of a 4770k. I can say for certain that a 450MHz PPC7400 is enough for 60% of tasks, and a 1.42GHz PPC7447 enough for 90% -- I can open up Github on Leopard WebKit and fork a repo from it just fine, for instance. There are definitely people who use beefy hardware -- 3D animators and CAD workers, but for every one of them there are ten Chromebook grandmas.
Performance exploded with AMD's and Apple's CPU the past two years. Does this mean that computers, all of a sudden, weren't fast enough in 2019, 2020 and 2021?
Actually, spacecraft use radiation hardened versions of the PPC chips, which cost in excesses of $200,000 each and take a long time to develop. Not the consumer version.
IBM RAD6000 - Wikipedia
RAD750 - Wikipedia
RAD5500 - Wikipedia
