Apple Thread - The most overrated technology brand?

[Tendie Switch]

Why does Mac suck with games, unless you want to try emulation?

• Apple wants to market to people who go outside and value productivity. The target audience goes out for a few hours to exercise or ride a train, and doesn't mind not being able to wear their headphones 24/7. They'd rather have a device that's portable than one that's comfortable/ergonomic to use. They think wires are unsightly. They'd rather study at a coffee shop than clear out 10 square feet for a desktop or docking station setup. Tim Cook admitted he wanted people to use his company's products to augment a conventional lifestyle, not replace it.
• Apple wants you to immerse yourself in the "real world." That's why their VR headset makes eye contact mandatory.
• Apple hates legacy and kills compatibility modes, etc., and would quickly shut down a legal version of a MacOS Classic emulator, much like DosBox.
• Apple would rather have a computer that makes no noise until it absolutely has to. Apple wants their products thin. While the M-series chips are quite efficient, the laws of physics can't be thwarted.
• Apple has gone all in on iGPUs.
• A lot of game graphics might come across as "trashy" or "cheesy" to a "refined" eye.
• Phone games make more sense for them since most of the popular ones are played in shorter sittings, and they're ideal for "time-poor" adults.
• Apple would rather market their products for "creative" fields like photography, non-animated film production, music production, protein folding, etc.
• Notice you never see an Apple commercial with someone on a Mac Studio or Mac Pro in a dark room lit by red and blue LED light, not caring about social norms, completely immersed in a giant monitor, with a clacky keyboard and mouse, in a manner that many find appalling or even unsanitary?
• Apple is also hostile to porn, "modular"-style audio synthesis, and prioritizing wired connection. Its target audience is social. Apple wants you to be relatable. Recording a singer-songwriter album can be appreciated by most people. Gaming achievements and hour counts can only be appreciated by... gamers.

 

[Jerk Sausage]

Apple sounds fucking based when you put it like that.

 

[Tendie Switch]

Apple sounds fucking based when you put it like that.

When you think about it, Apple's screen time kinda shames the same thing that "time played" displays encourage you to consider honorable.

 

[HX-2]

Why does Mac suck with games, unless you want to try emulation?

Apple has gone all in on iGPUs.

Apple would rather market their products for "creative" fields like photography, non-animated film production, music production, protein folding, etc.

You answered your own question, mate. Doesn't help that x86 blows ARM out of the water when it comes to raw performance.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

You answered your own question, mate. Doesn't help that x86 blows ARM out of the water when it comes to raw performance.

Then why do all ARM vs x86/64 benchmarks show x86 to be lagging behind severely, especially when it comes to performance per watt?

Some people know a LOT less about things than they try to act like they do.

 

[Diesel]

So this new Macbook Neo comes with a 20w charger, That's a phone charger.

I kind of like the idea of being able to run it off a cheap power bank or a cigarette adapter in a car.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

So this new Macbook Neo comes with a 20w charger, That's a phone charger.

I kind of like the idea of being able to run it off a cheap power bank or a cigarette adapter in a car.

Considering what my M1 MacBook Pro was like, the Neo will likely run for days off the battery on a full charge.

 

[Diesel]

Considering what my M1 MacBook Pro was like, the Neo will likely run for days off the battery on a full charge.

I think the neo battery is tiny tho. Some of the reviews I watched said Apple claims the Air still has a longer battery life.
I bet it will be a good battery life but the fact it will charge from anything is dope.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

I think the neo battery is tiny tho. Some of the reviews I watched said Apple claims the Air still has a longer battery life.
I bet it will be a good battery life but the fact it will charge from anything is dope.

A lot of reviewers do their battery tests in ways that are more worst-case scenario than realistic battery workflows, from what I usually see, but the ability to charge from a phone charger would be cool.

 

[Fcret]

Why does Mac suck with games, unless you want to try emulation?

The overwhelming majority of Macs sold are laptops with the macbook air being like 60% of volume just by itself. Laptops just generally aren't very pleasant to game on and, until recently, Apple didn't really have a software stack that could properly leverage the hardware for gaming.

I actually do foresee Apple pushing this much harder in the latter half of this decade (especially if they want to continue stealing marketshare from Microsoft) but it's going to take a lot of work for the software stack to be mature enough that devs flock to it. Hell, we're only three years into the Game Porting Toolkit being available and we've already seen a pretty big uptick in the number of games available natively on Apple Silicon.

Biggest elephant in the room is probably Steam. Apple would prefer people buy games from the app store instead of Steam and so they're incentivized to favor pure Mac ports that can be app store downloads rather than trying to build a properly robust proton-like layer that can be leveraged by third-party storefronts like Steam.

All that being said - I've messed around a bunch with Whisky (which is a frontend for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit) to play Windows games and the results are often surprisingly good. Definitely not a replacement for a proper PC gaming setup, but I've been able to get some pretty out-there stuff working so long as it's 64-bit and doesn't rely on anti-cheat.

You answered your own question, mate. Doesn't help that x86 blows ARM out of the water when it comes to raw performance.

Even if we grant that x86 has raw perf advantages over Apple's ARM chips, modern games are rarely CPU bound. The bigger issue has been Apple's in-house GPU development which has faced similar challenges as Intel's attempts to move beyond the integrated graphics weenie hut jr. dimension.

 

[Harry Dresden]

I think the neo battery is tiny tho. Some of the reviews I watched said Apple claims the Air still has a longer battery life.
I bet it will be a good battery life but the fact it will charge from anything is dope.

I saw some reviewers saying that the battery on the MacBook Neo only lasts 7 hours. Is this true? If so, it's pretty disappointing.

 

[Fcret]

I saw some reviewers saying that the battery on the MacBook Neo only lasts 7 hours. Is this true? If so, it's pretty disappointing.

That's about right. Apple claims about 16 hours for video playback and about 11 hours for wireless web browsing (keeping in mind that this assumes you're using Safari which is optimized for low power usage). If you mix anything else in there, you're going to see 7-9 hours and if you're doing heavy workloads/gaming, you should expect closer to 4 hours.

Not amazing by any means, but for the price and low wattage you can easily just drip charge it off a portable power bank.

 

[Harry Dresden]

That's about right. Apple claims about 16 hours for video playback and about 11 hours for wireless web browsing (keeping in mind that this assumes you're using Safari which is optimized for low power usage). If you mix anything else in there, you're going to see 7-9 hours and if you're doing heavy workloads/gaming, you should expect closer to 4 hours.

So how many hours would you get doing basic tasks like watching YouTube and reading Kiwi Farms with the Brave browser?

Not amazing by any means, but for the price and low wattage you can easily just drip charge it off a portable power bank.

Yeah, my current Windows laptop probably has the same amount of battery life, but I have heard about MacBooks having day-long battery life, but either way, I don't think it's a deal breaker. One potential deal breaker is the 13-inch screen; it looks small in the demos I have seen. Is that a potential issue or no? I currently use a 13-inch and might like a little bit more screen for sites like KiwiFarms.

 

[Fcret]

So how many hours would you get doing basic tasks like watching YouTube and reading Kiwi Farms with the Brave browser?

I haven't tested Brave on my Macbook in a while. Watching Youtube is almost negligible power consumption wise, but if Brave is like Chromium then I'd expect like 9 hours.

I have heard about MacBooks having day-long battery life

They do. The Macbook Airs can achieve that due to shipping with a much larger battery (almost twice the capacity of the Macbook Neo), but you're also going to be paying ~$500 more to move up to an M5 Macbook Air.

(The real play though is to get a certified refurbished M4 Macbook Air for $800 if the Neo isn't enough for you)

 

[Harry Dresden]

They do. The Macbook Airs can achieve that due to shipping with a much larger battery (almost twice the capacity of the Macbook Neo), but you're also going to be paying ~$500 more to move up to an M5 Macbook Air.

(The real play though is to get a certified refurbished M4 Macbook Air for $800 if the Neo isn't enough for you)

That is what I was going to ask. I'm thinking about what would be a better purchase: an older MacBook, probably even an M2, or the original M1, which is good enough for my needs. Would that be better than a MacBook Neo? I don't need insane performance, but I would like long battery life and a 15-inch screen. In that case, which MacBook would you suggest?

 

[Fcret]

That is what I was going to ask. I'm thinking about what would be a better purchase: an older MacBook, probably even an M2, or the original M1, which is good enough for my needs. Would that be better than a MacBook Neo? I don't need insane performance, but I would like long battery life and a 15-inch screen. In that case, which MacBook would you suggest?

For 15-inch, your only options are going to start with the M3 (which is when Apple introduced the 15-inch MBA).

You could also look for a 16-inch M1/M2-gen Macbook Pro, but I wouldn't spend good money on those systems at this point because M1 and M2 are getting long in the tooth. They're not terrible systems if you can get a crazy good deal on them somehow, but M1 is coming up on six years old now and the expectation is that the OS version released in 2028 will be the last major OS version to support it. M2 will probably last until 2029/2030.

What kind of budget do you have in mind? If it's around $1000, then I'd grab a certified refurbished 15-inch M4 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage from Apple. Refurbished is basically new because Apple replaces the chassis+battery and also offers a full "like new" warranty while slashing the price by a couple hundred bucks.

If your budget's a little tighter then you could look into ebay. 15-inch M3 MBAs go for around $700 on there but you're also spinning the ebay roulette as far as quality goes. M3 is still a great chip and it'll be supported well into the 2030s.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

 

[Harry Dresden]

What kind of budget do you have in mind? If it's around $1000, then I'd grab a certified refurbished 15-inch M4 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage from Apple. Refurbished is basically new because Apple replaces the chassis+battery and also offers a full "like new" warranty while slashing the price by a couple hundred bucks.

If your budget's a little tighter then you could look into ebay. 15-inch M3 MBAs go for around $700 on there but you're also spinning the ebay roulette as far as quality goes. M3 is still a great chip and it'll be supported well into the 2030s.

I'm on a tighter budget, maybe 600 bucks max. Apple refurbished 15-inch laptops are probably out of my budget range, and I don't want to risk buying something off of eBay, so after thinking about it, I might just end up buying the MacBook Neo, but I plan to test one out in person once all the big box stores get the MacBook Neo to see if I really need a 15-inch screen or not.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

[that's a lotta words]

As long as I can run the OS offline with no subscription bullshit and Apple doesn't remote control my system, that could be fine.

That backwards compatibility issue sucks though. With Apple you gotta keep updating to stay afloat, much more so than other OSes.

 

[PixarsTedKennedy]

I'm on a tighter budget, maybe 600 bucks max. Apple refurbished 15-inch laptops are probably out of my budget range, and I don't want to risk buying something off of eBay, so after thinking about it, I might just end up buying the MacBook Neo, but I plan to test one out in person once all the big box stores get the MacBook Neo to see if I really need a 15-inch screen or not.

What are your needs? I'd go with the M1 over the Neo all day long.