Boring is what we wanted

Posted by Amorymeltzer 10/28/2025

440 points | 267 commentspage 4

ZenoArrow 10/29/2025|

[flagged]

tpmoney 10/29/2025|

> This is pure copium. Generally, people want rapid technological advancements, not being sold minor improvements at premium prices.

Do they? I'm pretty sure it's an annual tradition around iPhone releases for all sorts of people to trot out their complaints about Apple releasing a new phone every year and contributing to e-waste by forcing people into buying an upgrade when their current phone is good enough. I can only imagine how much more griping we'd hear if each new iPhone actually was a rapid advancement over the previous generation that really did make it worth replacing your phone after only 1 year. Never mind all the people that would be upset at having bought a phone just 2 or 3 months before.

ZenoArrow 10/29/2025||

> Do they?

Yes, they do. The incremental improvements offered each year is not more desirable than rapid improvements.

> forcing people into buying an upgrade

FOMO doesn't mean devices stop working. Nobody is being forced into buying new devices.

To give a counter example, I've got a PS4 and have chosen not to get a PS5, partly because despite some advancements, it's not a large enough generational leap for me. I would prefer that when new devices are released, they offer something the previous generation could not. Similarly, I have no desire to buy a new phone every year, because the improvements are too small.

bittercynic 10/28/2025||

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 10/28/2025||

Windows 7 is sixteen years old. There are full x86 emulators available. Seems like a niche pursuit.

bittercynic 10/28/2025|||

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.

vardump 10/28/2025|||

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 to be fast enough on an Apple silicon Macbook in full emulated mode. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI

mrkpdl 10/28/2025|||

I don’t think that use case is worth designing a computer for in 2025

Apocryphon 10/28/2025|||

I have an old 2019 MBP running Windows 10 for old gaming

tiagod 10/28/2025|||

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.

iberator 10/29/2025||

Windows ARM?! Make article about it

trinix912 10/29/2025||

So it was with PowerPC, Sparc, SGI CPUs, and a bunch of older now obsolete architectures. I don't think we should be limiting the technological potential to keep old Windows drivers afloat, and they weren't native to the platform to begin with. You can always get a PC and virtualize Windows 7 just fine.

avmich 10/29/2025||

> The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted.

But did customers want it?

I'll leave it here, as the point is made.

stetrain 10/29/2025||

Customers seem pretty happy with the changes and sales are up since the transition.

A Macbook with some of the best processors available in a laptop with the battery life and thermal characteristics of an iPhone or iPad is a pretty compelling product for many people.

tpmoney 10/29/2025|||

Long time Apple customers? Almost certainly. Apple has a history of having conflict with their chip makers and other component vendors. For the longest time, Apple wasn't big enough for those vendors to bother with doing anything Apple wanted them to do. Or even when Apple was big, still wasn't big enough to make a dent in their vendor's pipelines (see also Intel and low power chips)

adastra22 10/29/2025||

You didn’t make any point.

bryanlarsen 10/28/2025|

M1 had performance/watt way ahead of x86.

M5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake.

Is that really what you want?

anon7000 10/28/2025||

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 10/28/2025||

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.

wpm 10/28/2025|||

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.

bryanlarsen 10/29/2025||

If you replaced your M4 with an M5 you'd get more performance but the power usage will go up substantially.

OTOH, if you replaced your 7800X3D with Raptor Lake you'll get similar performance for less power.

That was the point I was trying to make: 2025 processors have flipped the script. x86 used to be the power hogs and apple M processors were efficient. In 2025, Apple chose to increase power to increase performance, Intel is the manufacturer with substantially increased efficiency in 2025.

hinkley 10/28/2025||||

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.

Liftyee 10/29/2025||||

I think it's sometimes tempting for people to spill logical fallacies trying to argue against Mac lovers, when actually they just have different priors (they just value different aspects of the computer).

Yes, Macs have incredible compute/watt, display quality, and design. However, I like to think of myself as logical, and I would not buy a Mac.

Given the choice between a M5 Mac and a latest-gen ThinkPad, I would not take the Mac. That is fine, and so are people who would do the opposite. We are just looking for different qualities in our computer.

It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that. (No Windows means that the battery life hit is relatively light. FWIW, there's no chance I would buy a computer locked down to Windows either.)

I also value non-commitment to a particular ecosystem so I prefer not to buy Apple, because I think a significant amount of the device's value is in how seamlessly it integrates with other Apple devices.

However, one day in the future when many of my beliefs have become "bought out", perhaps my priorities will change and I will go all in on the ecosystem. That's OK as well.

ToucanLoucan 10/29/2025||

I mean you have a much more reasonable and nuanced opinion than the GP so I wouldn't rope you in with the aforementioned mental-gymnastic-ing fanboys. However, I feel the need to take issue here:

> It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that.

Genuine question: what do you mean locked down? By default the Mac won't run unsigned software, but that's not even today in MacOS 26 an unsolvable issue. I run all kinds of software not signed by Apple daily. There are nuances further still there, like sometimes if you want to install kernel level stuff or tweak certain settings, you have to disable SIP which is definitely a bit of a faff, but that's a Google-able thing that any tech literate person could accomplish inside of 30 minutes.

I would bow to the technical limitations, as you're rather locked to ARM64 compiled software, but I don't recall the last time I saw a piece of software getting current updates that doesn't include a binary for that.

adastra22 10/29/2025||||

Nit: the M5 Pro isn’t out yet (or even announced). Your system is only one generation out of date :)

ToucanLoucan 10/29/2025||

Oh I thought we were on M5. Time is a lie, lol.

adastra22 10/30/2025||

The M5 is out, but only the base model. The Pro, Max, and Ultra models always take a little longer.

ToucanLoucan 10/30/2025||

Ohhhh I see what you're saying, okay I thought I did read about the M5 haha!

b_e_n_t_o_n 10/28/2025||||

And even for gaming, depending on what you play it's perfectly serviceable.

mdasen 10/28/2025|||

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.

doomroot13 10/28/2025|||

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.

AndrewDucker 10/28/2025|||

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.

mcphage 10/28/2025|||

No, you're right, that's not—let me go buy a Panther Lake laptop right now. What site would you recommend?

bryanlarsen 10/28/2025||

M5 and Panther Lake are both late 2025 releases. They're fair comparisons.

plorkyeran 10/28/2025|||

One of them I can go to the store and buy right now. One I cannot. That is a very important difference.

doomroot13 10/28/2025||||

Panther Lake isn't appearing in any products until 2026.

hinkley 10/28/2025|||

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 10/28/2025||

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_ 10/28/2025||||

You're absolutely right. Where should we go to get a Panther Lake laptop?

mcphage 10/28/2025||

That’s exactly what I’m asking.

mcphage 10/28/2025||||

And we’re sure that when it shows up in products it’ll be as good as Intel says it is?

nl 10/29/2025|||

Intel's CEO said Q1 2026 for market availability for Panther Lake.

There are no benchmarked samples yet.

I'd love Intel to do well with this, but Intel has disappointed before.

supportengineer 10/28/2025|||

I don't want Panther Lake, whatever that is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

Spivak 10/28/2025||

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.

BirAdam 10/28/2025|||

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.

tacticus 10/28/2025||

so slower compared to the 14th gens.

Though it sounds like it won't be a 400W desktop part at least.

rsynnott 10/29/2025||

... I mean, given Intel's history in this department, you'd probably want to wait until Panther Lake is available before getting too excited.