Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee" are completely missing the fucking point.
Don't tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
Performance wise? No not any more. Price wise? Again no. Screen quality wise? Only on the Pro. Battery life wise? Yes, with very few exceptions. There are also the software compatibility issues that made me sell mine.
Really? I thought I saw multiple benchmarks with the m-chips blowing all the other Intel and AMD chips out of the water.
I think you have been looking at Apple Benchmarks. M-series isn't the fastest in multi-core now or when it was released, though it might have been fastest when the first Max chip came out, hard to tell. They had a small lead in single core at one point though I think. It might be faster than the latest AMD by a small lead depending which benchmarks you look at.
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-13900k-vs-apple-m3-max
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m3-max-vs-amd-ryzen-9-7945hx
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m1-vs-amd_ryzen_7_4800h
Ah okay! Thank you for providing sources. It still seems like a competitive chip, but I see I was wrong about it being outright better.
I think the first two comparisons are a little unfair (unless I'm mistaken) since those are both desktop spec chips and apple doesn't realllyyy do desktops anymore.
The second one is a laptop chip, you maybe need to brush up on CPU naming. I actually meant to have a laptop chip for the first as well but I made an error. M3 Max is used in both desktop and laptops. Stop thinking of M series in terms of desktop or laptop, it's meant to be a multi purpose chip. Even with Intel and AMD you see chips and dies getting reused between desktops and laptops.
Anyway here is one with an Intel laptop chip: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-14900hx-vs-apple-m3-max
Although if we are comparing desktop only chips then AMD have Threadripper Pro and Apple has M3 Ultra. I am pretty sure I know who comes out on top (hint: it's the one with up to 96 cores)
Apple definitely does desktops as M Ultra is only available in desktops and is too hot for Apple Laptops. Although to be fair I could see one of the gaming laptop companies maybe finding a way to make it work.
Ohhh I missed the "H" when I read that. My bad.
Edit: Yeah, I saw the Mac Pro release, but didn't hear much after that. It seemed like it would end up being really niche. I didn't realize they had made a desktop specific m3 chip for it. This is what I get for not following tech recently haha.
I would imagine with apple's poor cooling, many of the Intel and AMD chips would perform worse in the real world in one of their laptops given the difference in power usage. That's just a theory though given their past thermal issues.
Mac Pro? First Ultra class chip came in Mac Studio. They missed an opportunity to call it a Mac Pro Mini.
They've actually improved cooling a fair bit. The two chips I mentioned though are definitely power hungry though. That Intel chip can use up to 115W sustained. I don't think I want to know what the burst power is. The larger MacBook Pro might actually be able to get close to that (I think Apple's solution is on the order of 100W if you push both CPU and GPU simultaneously). Yeah the Apple system is considerably lower power once you start looking at GPUs as well.
Edit: actually looking at it the AMD Chip is only rated at 55W similar to Apple's CPU cores. I think in practice it will be higher though.
Edit 2: Sustained boost of 128W apparently on the AMD chip. Sheesh.