Snippet: Reviewing PCs in the Age of Apple Silicon ☇

John Gruber commenting on Scharon Harding, reviewing the HP Spectre x360 13.5-inch laptop for Ars Technica:

The phrase “Stockholm Syndrome” gets overused, but I think PC hardware reviewers are in a deep state of denial as to how high Apple silicon has raised the bar for performance-per-watt, in day-to-day practical terms. To an M-series MacBook user, the above paragraphs sound like they must have been written years ago. Too-hot-for-your-actual-lap laptops and audible cooling systems are dark ages shit.

This hit way too close to home for me, as my day job involves some of the “better” HP business-grade products and I also recently got an M2-based MacBook Air. In a vacuum, laptops like the HPs (which are very similar to the Spectre x360), are quite nice little computers, but start blasting hot air out of the vent almost immediately and get quite warm to the touch. Meanwhile, I’m at about 3 hours into the day of using my MacBook Air as I write this and it’s cool to the touch while still having plenty of battery life.

This isn’t meant to be a cheap-shot post about PCs, but rather that I hope the folks at Intel and AMD are looking at the Apple Silicon-based Macs and trying to figure out how they can get there on the PC side of things. On top of that, so many reviewers and fans of PCs don’t seem to grasp that Apple Silicon isn’t “too good to be true” or marketing hype.